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The Politics of Land
Urban Agriculture, Revalorization, and Green Gentrification in Denver, Colorado
Joshua Sbicca,
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To cite this document: Joshua Sbicca, "Urban Agriculture, Revalorization, and Green
Gentrification in Denver, Colorado" In The Politics of Land. Published online: 25 Feb
2019; 149-170.
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URBAN AGRICULTURE,
REVALORIZATION, AND GREEN
GENTRIFICATION IN DENVER,
COLORADO
Joshua Sbicca
ABSTRACT
As a sustainability initiative with the backing of civil society, business, or
government interests, urban agriculture can drive green gentrification even
when advocates of these initiatives have good intentions and are aware of
their exclusionary potential for urban farmers and residents. I investigate this
more general pattern with the case of how urban agriculture became used for
green gentrification in Denver, Colorado. This is a city with many urban
farmers that gained access to land after the Great Recession but faced the
contradiction of being a force for displacement and at risk of displacement as
the city adopted new sustainability and food system goals, the housing market
recovered, and green gentrification spread. I argue that to understand this
outcome, it is necessary to explain how political economy and cultural forces
create neighborhood disinvestment and economic marginalization and compel
the entrance of urban agriculture initiatives due to their low-profit mode of
production and potential economic, environmental, and social benefits.
Central to how urban agriculture initiatives contribute to green gentrification
is the process of revalorization, which is how green growth machines repur-
pose such initiatives by drawing on their cultural cachet to exploit rent gaps.
I conclude with a set of hypotheses to help other scholars test the conditions
under which urban agriculture is more or less likely to contribute to green
gentrification. Doing so may help nuance convictions about the benefits of
The Politics of Land
Research in Political Sociology, Volume 26, 149170
Copyright r2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0895-9935/doi:10.1108/S0895-993520190000026011
149
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urban agriculture within the context of entrenched inequalities in rapidly
changing cities.
Keywords: Green gentrification; urban agriculture; local food; valorization;
environmental sociology; sociology of food
In 2011, a major political opportunity opened to expand urban agriculture in
Denver. Michael Hancock was elected as the Mayor. During his campaign, he
committed to promote economic and community development and address gaps
in food access with urban agriculture. In response to the ongoing fallout from
the Great Recession, his mayoral bid rested on what he called the “People’s
Plan.”The goal of the plan was to jumpstart the economy. In line with trends
throughout the United States, one mechanism was to develop a more robust
local food system.
This plan was met with accolades by Denver’s food movement. After all,
Denver is the only municipality on the Front Range that does not have dedi-
cated open-space funding. The city lacks a working land trust, so there is very
little preserved farmland. There was hope that after decades of farm loss, the
trend would start to reverse; 307 farms operated in the city in 1925, which
dropped to nine by 2016. Under this new scenario, Denver farmers would have
access to more land, local food availability would increase for everyone, and
food dollars would circulate more within the community. Mayoral candidate
Hancock proposed to create an urban farm network to “grow a homegrown
fresh-food economy in the city.”This would get established by transforming
former Mayor John Hickenlooper’s Greenprint Denver, a five-year, citywide
plan to reduce global warming emissions by 20 percent while creating 1,000
green jobs, into a permanent Office of Sustainability. Together with the Office of
Economic Development, the hope was to meet what became known as the 2020
Sustainability Goals. As part of this plan, the city’s“local food”goal committed
to having more of the food it consumes grown or processed in Colorado
(Angelo & Goldstein, 2016).
What was less understood at the time of Michael Hancock’s campaign was
that a booming economic recovery was around the corner. With it came a wave
of gentrification, resulting in both the displacement of longtime residents and
urban farms. As a result, many activists in Denver’s food movement have grown
frustrated with the citywide challenges of urban agriculture amid an unequal
housing recovery after the Great Recession. Development interests have repeat-
edly used urban agriculture to advance exclusionary gentrification, while local
government has done little to promote affordable housing or urban agriculture
as a legitimate long-term land use. Instead, economic and political elites deploy
“local food”to capture the cultural value of the food movement and leverage
urban agriculture initiatives to valorize neighborhoods targeted for economic
development after the Great Recession. Urban agriculture was supposed to fix
problems, not become a tool to fix capital and advance gentrification.
The green gentrification literature broadly agrees that the growth imperative
of capitalist urbanization compels local governments to greenwash development
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through sustainability initiatives in disinvested neighborhoods, which attracts
new wealth and residents and displaces working-class communities and commu-
nities of color (Checker, 2011;Curran & Hamilton, 2012;Gould & Lewis, 2017;
Safransky, 2014;Wolch, Byrne, & Newell, 2014). But like much of the gentrifi-
cation scholarship, the idea of green gentrification needs continual theoretical
refinement to generate fuller explanations (Lees, Slater, & Wyly, 2008).
1
One
dynamic endeavor requires specifying the relationship between culture and polit-
ical economy, especially as it relates to the distinctions between different land
uses and configurations of power (Zukin, 1987;Zukin, 1991).
As a sustainability initiative with the backing of civil society, business, or
government interests, urban agriculture can drive green gentrification even when
advocates of these initiatives have the best of intentions and are aware of their
exclusionary potential for urban farmers and residents. I argue that to under-
stand this outcome, it is necessary to explain the relationship between how
neighborhoods experience disinvestment and economic marginalization and the
entrance of urban agriculture initiatives due to their low-profit mode of produc-
tion and potential economic, environmental, and social benefits. Central to how
urban agriculture initiatives contribute to green gentrification is the process of
revalorization, which is how green growth machines repurpose such initiatives
by drawing on their cultural cachet to exploit rent gaps.
To better understand the exclusionary outcomes associated with different
forms of green gentrification, it is necessary to pay closer attention to the process
of revalorization. This is multifaceted, so I focus on the relationship between
structural economic conditions, city, and neighborhood-level political and social
dynamics, urban agriculture initiatives, and how people interpret them on a
microlevel. In the context of policy-led and developer-attuned green gentri-
fication pressures, urban agriculture initiatives may both contribute to
neighborhood-level demographic shifts and in the process compromise their very
ability to stay in place.
In the following sections, I further theorize these connections by synthesizing
the literatures on growth machines, urban agriculture, and green gentrification.
Then, I provide an analysis of this Denver case study and the historical context
of the Great Recession to explain the process of revalorization, and the contra-
dictory position of urban farmers being a force for displacement and at risk of
displacement as the city adopted new sustainability and food system goals, the
housing market recovered, and green gentrification spread. I conclude with a
discussion of the key theoretical takeaways and suggest several conditions under
which urban agriculture is more and less likely to lead to green gentrification.
(GREEN) GROWTH MACHINES AND URBAN
AGRICULTURE
Under the growth machine logic, political and economic elites (e.g., planners,
politicians, real estate brokers, and developers) work together to commodify
land to increase economic growth within cities (Molotch, 1976). Simply put,
when there is a large gap between the prevailing and potential market rate for
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real estate, growth machines devise capital investment strategies to generate
profit. One of the driving cultural dimensions of this process is that post-
industrial cities led by artistic-minded professionals in service- and knowledge-
based economies can be attractive to move to if there are amenities or initiatives
that reflect middle-class tastes. The green growth machine recognizes that sus-
tainability initiatives like community gardens that “green”space or grocery
stores that “green”diets can signal that a neighborhood is ready to move into
(Anguelovski, 2016;Martinez, 2010). While middle-class people do not hold a
monopoly on these tastes, they have the collective economic power to shape
retail and housing markets to their liking. As these green tastes manifest in sus-
tainability initiatives, they can both cause and enhance gentrification (Gould &
Lewis, 2017).
The displacement pressure created by green growth machines creates signifi-
cant hurdles for urban farmers and gardeners to bring enough land under pro-
duction to feed even a fraction of large metropolitan areas (Grewal & Grewal,
2012;Martellozzo et al., 2014;McClintock, Cooper, & Khandeshi, 2013). Given
the spread of urban development, the gradual removal of food production from
cities, and the rezoning of cities for other purposes, the rural-to-urban popula-
tion shift, and the persistent economic challenges associated with farming, the
long-term viability of urban agriculture as a food localization strategy remains
in question. For instance, as people continue to repopulate urban centers
once abandoned for the suburbs, development pressures drive up property
values. The high cost of land makes it hard to afford to grow fruits and
vegetables (Oberholtzer, Dimitri, & Pressman, 2014). Even if someone attains
land at an affordable price, there is the issue of land tenure (Ghose and
Pettygrove, 2014; Thibert, 2012). Knowing that property values may increase or
that some development opportunity may yield greater profits from the land,
many property owners will lease the land, usually without an option to buy.
The need to maximize land rents and profit complicates urban farming. First,
low-resourced urban farmers usually grow on marginal sites like rooftops, park-
ways, and former industrial plots. Additionally, for non-profit initiatives, they
often locate in working-class neighborhoods, donate much of their produce, and
rarely own land (Dimitri et al., 2016). Nevertheless, there is pressure from
funders, governments, scholars, and food activists to achieve the “unattainable
trifecta of urban agriculture:”good food, workforce development and training,
and good jobs (Daftary-Steel, Herrera, & Porter, 2015). Second, there is racial
and class stratification in land tenure, with working-class urban farmers of color
most likely to experience insecure arrangements (Reynolds & Cohen, 2016).
Similarly, the renter class of urban farmers and gardeners is more subject to
eviction, often under the guise that the land is not being put to its most produc-
tive use, that is, its capacity to maximize profit(Schmelzkopf, 1995). Third, the
social and ecological benefits of urban agriculture can attract capital and
become an amenity for green gentrification (McClintock, 2018). There are
unintended consequences of greening efforts and revitalization through alter-
native food initiatives such as farmers’markets, local food restaurants, and
community gardens (Anguelovski, 2016;Cadji & Alkon, 2015;Checker, 2011;
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Curran & Hamilton, 2012;Voicu & Been, 2008). For example, in a survey of
the literature on community gardens, Guitart et al. (2012) found a positive cor-
relation between these neighborhood amenities and increased property values.
Urban agriculture is therefore in a precarious place. Advocates and scholars
often claim it can solve social problems, but it may be a victim of its own success
and undermine the communities it was supposed to benefit.
VALORIZATION, GREEN GENTRIFICATION, AND
FARMING IN THE CITY
Under capitalism, land’s use value is subservient to exchange value (Wood,
2002). The profit motive encourages expropriating the usefulness of land (e.g.,
the ability to grow food) to make money (e.g., turning the food into a commod-
ity and/or building housing). Another way of talking about this process is valori-
zation. Because private property regimes bestow exclusive rights to parcels of
land, there is a structural incentive to find ways to increase the perceived value
of property to turn a profit from its sale. Value producing activity could include
making improvements to a house (e.g., planting a garden), to a neighborhood
(e.g., providing amenities like farmer’s markets), or to a city (e.g., incentivizing
local food production), but the valorization of land in cities is not strictly an
economic process; it entails the cooperation between businesses, developers, and
real estate brokers and local government (Molotch, 1976).
Urban agriculture exists within a neoliberal governance context where cities
respond to ecological pressures and strive to maintain economic growth by com-
peting for residents with sustainability initiatives that can spur capital invest-
ment (While, Jonas and Gibbs, 2004; Walker, 2016). This means that achieving
green outcomes, like increasing the acreage of a city’s land under agricultural
production to increase local food consumption, co-occurs with entrepreneurial
activity. Even when urban agriculture initiatives prioritize the cultural or eco-
logical value of their work, it can be difficult to avoid reproducing neoliberal
processes and logics at a local level (Pudup, 2008). Food and farming fit well
into this scenario (Safransky, 2017). In cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Los
Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Oakland, Portland, San Francisco, and
Seattle (to name some well-studied examples), urban agriculture contends with
the contradiction between the use values it provides to residents (e.g., commu-
nity space) and its inability to offer much in the way of exchange values compet-
itive with other land uses (Alkon, Kato, & Sbicca, 2018). The “highest and best
use”is rarely growing food.
As McClintock (2018) contends, urban agriculture can become part of the
process of green gentrification: urban growth machines draw on its “symbolic
sustainability capital”to revalorize disinvested parts of cities for redevelopment,
which obscures the raced and classed processes that displaced people from a
neighborhood and that drew people back in. One of McClintock’s main argu-
ments is that the revalorization of urban agriculture is socially and spatially
uneven. Yet, one of the unexplored explanations for this unevenness is that spe-
cific historical moments can condition revalorization.
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Gould and Lewis (2017) argue for the significance of “greening events.”They
suggest that the speculative development of a green amenity or sustainability ini-
tiative by outsiders can be the trigger for green gentrification in a neighborhood
or city. It is critical to nuance this causal explanation by accounting for how
these localized greening events interact with structural conditions. Key to my
arguments in this article is the fact that gentrification relies on the boom and
bust cycle of housing markets (Smith, 1996). One of the national responses to
the Great Recession by city leaders throughout the United States was to encour-
age the production and consumption of local food in the name of creating resil-
iency to economic shocks. Federal and foundation money flowed to non-profits
and businesses to reduce food insecurity, create jobs, and green abandoned
property. Urban farmers found themselves in a precarious position because it
became easier to start new urban agriculture initiatives, but these often took
place in economically disinvested neighborhoods.
Revalorization is therefore a multifaceted process. The foreclosure crisis
increased the overall ratio of vacant property. In turn, property became deva-
lued. To prevent the total collapse of prices due to vacancies and neighborhood
flight, developers offered their land to urban farmers to prevent “blight,”which
“revalued”the property once the recession subsided and the housing demand
increased. At the same time, urban agriculture proliferated in disinvested neigh-
borhoods because the economic margins of farming are slim, which compelled
urban farmers to find ways to reduce typical barriers to entry. However, once
the economy recovered, developers and investors searched for the next “up-and-
coming”neighborhoods. They looked to those places with the highest post-
recession social and ecological investment, which is where there are the largest
exploitable rent gaps. This new round of development was helped in part by the
cultural appeal of urban agriculture initiatives and their uniquely precarious
land tenure arrangements. Contradictorily, because urban agriculture faces
profit barriers, especially in Denver where the growing season is five months,
urban agriculture is forced to constantly chase “underutilized”land, which it
holds until displaced by a more profitable land use. Without long-term leases,
regulatory changes to zoning and land use laws, or access to more public land,
urban agriculture will remain entangled in the gentrification process.
METHODS
In the summer of 2015, I started investigating Denver’s food movement. I was
curious how activists navigate improving the local food system in the context of
competing interests and urbanization processes. I became especially interested at
the outset of this research in Mayor Hancock’s commitment to local food pro-
duction and the relationship between gentrification and urban agriculture
because many urban farmers started experiencing displacement. At the same
time, the work of the main representative body of the food movement, the
Denver Sustainable Food Policy Council (DSFPC), included several urban agri-
culture initiatives that aligned with the 2020 Sustainability Goals around local
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food. Combined, these were indications of a distinct set of conditions connecting
food, urban agriculture, and green gentrification in Denver.
Over two years, with the help of three research assistants, we interviewed 67
people who are part of the food movement. They represent one or more of a
purposive sample of 111 public or private organizations, businesses, or govern-
ment entities aiming to improve Denver’s food system. My sample is representa-
tive and includes urban farmers, gardeners, chefs, owners of farm to
table restaurants, caterers, vegan activists, food justice organizers, dietary health
advocates, anti-hunger representatives, extension officers, and others. Almost all
the interviewees are in leadership positions in their organizations and are paid
for their work. About 52 percent of my sample identify as female, and the rest
identify as male (48 percent). An overwhelming majority of the participants are
white (>85 percent), while the rest are roughly split between Asian, black, and
Latinx. The education level of participants is high, with over 80 percent having
attained at least a bachelor’s degree. Last, reflecting the mixed political views in
Denver, 56 percent identify as liberal, 33 percent as moderate or independent,
and 11 percent as conservative or other. For the purposes of this article, I focus
on interviews with 25 people, a subsample whose work includes non- and for-
profit food production or food system planning on issues of local food and land
use policy.
The most pertinent questions from the semi-structured interview guide asked
people about their work, how they became involved, how the local economic
and political environment influence their work, institutional pressures, and their
experiences with land acquisition and land use. Using the qualitative data anal-
ysis software, NVivo 11, I ran queries looking for discussion of development,
land, gentrification, and urban agriculture to find relevant interviews to code.
First, I discovered that interviewees held common grievances. The local food
commitment of the 2020 Sustainability Goals was initially ill-defined and
ultimately did not explicitly entail supporting Denver farmers; government
agencies and the Denver Housing Authority were unreliable partners; and
gentrification increased the lack of affordable land, land insecurity, and the
economic precariousness of urban agriculture. Second, and relatedly, post-
Great Recession development patterns structured how activists proposed or
engaged in land acquisition strategies. Last, there were conflicted views on how
urban agriculture initiatives play into revalorizing neighborhoods. Interviewees
interpreted urban agriculture as a precarious practice due to gentrification or
that it can contribute to gentrification. The evidence suggests that both are tak-
ing place.
To understand how urban agriculture becomes a tool for green gentrification,
I triangulated interviewees’perspectives with reports, meeting minutes, listserv
emails, and policy proposals produced by Denver city agencies, DSFPC, and
Denver Housing Authority. These documents outline government and stake-
holder data, priorities, and framing of several pertinent issues: food system plan-
ning, economic development, poverty, housing, and gentrification. I also rely on
local reporting on these issues in both the mainstream and alternative press to
trace the similarities and differences in how local food and urban agriculture are
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understood with respect to economic development and housing. To properly
contextualize this research, I turn now to relevant planning and housing history
in Denver.
PUTTING GREEN GENTRIFICATION IN DENVER INTO
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The Denver region went from an agriculturally rich area before World War II,
replete with farms, orchards, ranches, and food-processing facilities, to a boom-
ing postwar metropolitan magnet. Over a 20-year period, the population grew
by close to 150 percent, largely due to strong manufacturing and service sectors,
hundreds of federal agencies and military installations, and profitable extraction
of energy resources. It also became a tourist gateway to the Rocky Mountains.
These growth factors squeezed out agriculture to accommodate more residents.
To house the 600,000 new residents that flooded into the metropolitan area
between 1940 and 1965, the city and county of Denver, under pressure from
powerful developers, used their legal authority to create new residential subdivi-
sions in both open spaces and agricultural spaces (Bunyak, Simmons, &
Simmons, 2011). It is unsurprising that after 1965, the role of agriculture rapidly
declined. While there were 11,211 acres of land in 81 farms in 1959, this dropped
to 419 acres in 58 farms in 1964.
Like many cities during this era, the economic development was uneven.
Under “separate but equal”statutes, people of color faced discrimination in
employment, education, places of business, public space, and housing. As
Denver started annexing land at its periphery to accommodate a growing white
population with suburban developments, black and Latinx communities were
subject to redlining and racial covenants that confined them to the most mar-
ginal neighborhoods in North Denver. According to maps developed by the
Homeowners’Loan Corporation (HOLC) to determine credit worthiness and
risk in major American cities, the Denver neighborhoods with the highest con-
centration of blacks and Latinx were deemed either “hazardous”or “definitely
declining”(Jackson, 1980). Until Colorado passed the Fair Housing Practices
Act in 1959, banks were legally allowed to refuse to lend to people of color if
they deemed that their redlined neighborhood was “blighted”and therefore a
lending “risk.”Denver Post journalist George Brown (1954) remarked that
“racial bigotry is embedded deep in the Denver housing situation”and “showed
more prejudice than any other phase of the city’s activity.”Moreover, for those
people of color who sought to move into white neighborhoods, restrictive
clauses were written into deeds that prevented them from owning the home due
to their race. Even after the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968,
de facto segregation remained in Denver for decades, with many reported inci-
dents of white homeowners refusing to sell to black and Latinx families (Bunyak
et al., 2011).
Between 1970 and 1980, wealthier white neighborhoods became more
homogenous, while income segregation ossified. This was a decade of uneven
economic opportunity. Residents experienced moderate levels of neighborhood
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mobility around the central business district (CBD) as low-wage earners had
fewer local opportunities compared to middle- and high-wage earners. Both dis-
placement and gentrification were outcomes of this process (Clark, 1985). The
neighborhoods most likely to gentrify had high concentrations of people of color
and high unemployment rates, entrenched poverty and many low-income fami-
lies, and underrepresentation in higher paying occupations in the neighboring
CBD. As downtown Denver became a more attractive place to live for high
earners, working-class neighborhoods increasingly became sites for speculation
and “revitalization”(Clark, 1985). Without any public policy intervening to
slow this process and latent political support for wealthy residents and develop-
ment interests, the city was waiting for someone to articulate justifications for
exclusionary gentrification.
Denver’s former Planning Director, Jennifer Moulton, was perhaps the most
influential figure responsible for the redevelopment of Lower Downtown
(“LoDo”), a nodal neighborhood around which gentrification has spread.
Moulton was the first chair of Historic Denver’s preservation committee and
was the key lobbyist for designating LoDo a historic district in 1988. Then, in
the midst of her 12-year run as Denver’s Planning Director from 1992 to 2004,
she wrote Ten Steps to a Living Downtown, a statement whose main logics con-
tinue to resonate in local planning and housing circles (Maher, 2005). Its histori-
cal narrative of urban disinvestment focuses on road and automobile expansion,
suburban opportunity, and middle-class flight. There is no racial or class con-
flict, no discrimination, and no politics in this framing of how downtown
Denver lost its population and why large concentrations of blacks and Latinx
remained until gentrification began in the 1970s. With this story in place,
Moulton (1999) contends that to resolve the rent gap requires market-based
solutions: “Public policy cannot by itself create demand for housing anywhere,
especially downtown. However, in conjunction with private business initiatives,
local government can help accelerate potential into action by educating, pro-
viding incentives and removing regulatory obstacles.”This requires typical
growth machine strategies brand a distinct image, bring in middle- and
upper-middle-class amenities, criminalize the poor, keep the “funky”feel of
historic buildings, eliminate burdensome regulations, and create financial
incentives for development. As Denver has entered further into the 2000s,
gentrification has evolved from one of the other strategies that Moulton
mentions, increasing green space, to include other sustainability initiatives.
Environmentally focused branding, an array of sustainable amenities, and
government support for green business development feature prominently.
Developing Denver required pushing out agriculture and carving up the city
along race and class lines. Now, edible landscaping, farms, and personal and
community gardens are again widespread, albeit under conditions where devel-
opers leverage the popularity and precarity of urban agriculture to revalorize
neighborhoods.
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URBAN AGRICULTURE TO THE REVALORIZATION
RESCUE
Organized garden projects have been taking place in Denver since at least 1985
when Denver Urban Gardens (DUG) was founded. Their mission is to foster
community by providing support to neighborhoods wanting a community gar-
den, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. DUG started with three gardens
and as of 2018 operate over 170 community gardens in the Denver metro area,
most of which are in Denver. Although the popularity of urban agriculture ebbs
and flows (Lawson, 2005), the current uptick appears connected to the surge in
interest in local food (Johnson, 2016). This was evident in Denver when Mayor
Hickenlooper took the unprecedented step in 2009 to declare May 14, Grow
Local Colorado Day. Due to community organizing by well-established non-
profits like DUG and grassroots upstarts like Grow Local Colorado and
Transition Denver, disparate urban agriculture initiatives began to cohere
around the opportunity to expand their work in response to the Great
Recession. Consider that DUG more than doubled the number of their commu-
nity gardens in the 10 years since 2008.
With recovery from the Great Recession still years away and a national polit-
ical climate open to urban agriculture, Denver signaled their support for
expanding local food production.
2
Local media coverage spiked as residents
sought ways to absorb the economic shock and reimagine urban landscapes with
food.
3
Notably, the city backed an edible public demonstration garden at Civic
Center Park, the political heart of Colorado as well as Denver. Then, in 2010,
Mayor Hickenlooper formed the DSFPC, which immediately went to work on a
cottage foods’amendment to allow residents to sell food grown at home and a
new guideline permitting chickens and dwarf goats on residential lots. With the
election of Mayor Hancock in 2011, many new opportunities emerged to coordi-
nate across local food movement interests. Denver’s 2020 Sustainability Goals
proposed to grow and process at least 20 percent of the city’s food from the state
of Colorado, combat climate change, reduce obesity, reduce waste, and provide
workforce training to support Denver employers. Mayor Hancock also created
the position of Manager of Food System Development out of the Office of
Economic Development, making Denver one of the only cities in the United
States to have dedicated funding for such an official government position.
However, without explicit policy or public planning statements tying local food
commitments to food production in Denver that availed far more land to urban
agriculture, many initiatives were at the disposal of developers and a rapidly
inflating housing market.
While urban agriculture has been a common practice in Denver for decades,
the increased political support came at a time when city planners sought to
achieve the ideal “triple bottom line”of environmental, economic, and social
sustainability. On its face, this appears like a windfall for local food and urban
agriculture activists. Unfortunately, intentions do not always translate into
outcomes. Like many North American cities, urban agriculture in Denver is
entangled in gentrification, which suggests that urban agriculture is not a
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“win-win-win”practice (Walker, 2016). The post-Great Recession challenge for
Denver’s food movement, which held far more economic and social capital than
those facing the threat of displacement from their neighborhoods, became how
to advance some of its most cherished initiatives, like increasing local food pro-
duction and consumption, without them becoming sustainability goals that are
subordinate to development interests.
Recession, Devaluation, and the Production of Exclusion
The Great Recession led to a devaluation in property and an increase in eco-
nomic insecurity. This made it far easier for both for-profit and non-profit urban
farmers to fill vacant properties. In several instances, the unintended conse-
quence of taking over cheap land in gentrifying neighborhoods was that once
their land tenure expired, new housing development rendered those spaces more
exclusionary than before.
Between 2006 and 2010, 30,741 homes went into foreclosure (Office of the
Clerk & Recorder, 2017). For comparison, only 720 homes went into foreclosure
in 2016. The foreclosure crisis stripped many working-class communities and
communities of color, those most targeted by predatory lenders, of a major
asset, further entrenching their economic disadvantage (Rugh & Massey, 2010).
While proponents claimed that making it easier to own a home would lift more
families into the middle class, the Great Recession showed the illusiveness of
this dream. According to the Denver Post,“The bottom one-third of homes in
value accounted for 51.7 percent of foreclosures in metro Denver”(Svaldi,
2016). Like the rest of the country, across cities in the Mountain West, black
and Latinx homeowners experienced the highest foreclosure risks (Hall,
Crowder, & Spring, 2015).
The ripple effect of the devaluation in housing prices unevenly spread
throughout Denver’s economy, setting the stage for a new wave of exclusionary
gentrification. Despite the macroeconomic recovery from high unemployment
and poverty rates, microeconomic conditions remain inequitable (United States
Census Bureau, a, n.d.). Black and Latinx Denverites fare worse than whites.
Estimates suggest that in 2015, 12 percent of blacks and 8 percent of Latinx
were unemployed, while 30 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Latinx lived in
poverty (United States Census Bureau, b, n.d., c, n.d.). Comparing 2000 to the
20102014 recovery period, 20 percent more poor blacks and 22 percent more
poor Latinx live in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. In
total, 64 percent of all poor blacks and 74 percent of all poor Latinx live in
neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. Poor people of color
experience the added burden of being isolated in neighborhoods with highly con-
centrated poverty (Kneebone & Holmes, 2016). And yet, years after the official
recovery from the Great Recession, the neighborhoods with the highest concen-
trations of low-income people and people of color are vulnerable to or are
experiencing gentrification (Denver Office of Economic Development, 2016).
Not only are housing prices increasing but also the class and ethnoracial mix
includes far more wealthy and white people (Community Facts, n.d.).
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Based on the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s Home Price Index, home
values in the Denver metropolitan area increased by 67 percent since their peak
in 2006 before the foreclosure crisis (Gumbinger, 2017). In Denver alone, home
values that fell by 22 percent at their nadir are now worth 40 percent more than
during the frenzied zenith of the last housing bubble (Gudell, 2016). There is
also rapid population growth in Denver County. The county has added nearly
124,500 people since 2006. With all the pressure to house these people, develo-
pers and businesses are devising ways to attract the newcomers to different
neighborhoods. This raises a pertinent question. How does the cultural appeal
of local food and urban agriculture help revalorize disinvested neighborhoods to
attract an influx of middle-class people?
From “Underutilized Land”to Urban Agriculture to Condos
To attract new residents, cities must create economic, cultural, and esthetic
incentives (Schlichtman, Patch, & Hill, 2017.). As a mayoral candidate, Michael
Hancock laid out an economic development plan that would entice well-
educated people to move to Denver. According to his campaign materials, he
planned to “re-boot the Denver Office of Economic Development and all of city
government to become an efficient, fiscally responsible and strong partner for
businesses.”As “Marketer-in-Chief,”he promised to “aggressively”market
Denver to recruit new businesses “to elevate Denver’s brand as a business-
friendly city with the highest quality of life”(Luning, 2010). This is perhaps
unsurprising given that Mayor Hancock, along with many local politicians, has
come under the powerful influence of development, business, and corporate
interests (Davies, 2015;Murray, 2016). Until a milquetoast affordable housing
plan, Mayor Hancock has avoided making many investments or commitments
to ensure that Denver is livable for all residents, regardless of income (Carter,
2016). When he has made token efforts, say in the plan to tweak a previously
failed inclusionary housing ordinance (IHO), this has come after multiple waves
of gentrification (Murray, 2014). Denver is unaffordable for many poor and
working-class people, and most affordable housing developments are integrated
into mixed-use developments with more market rate housing. The IHO only
requires that 10 percent of units match affordable housing statutes.
Gentrification in these neighborhoods is therefore highly likely.
Under this scenario, urban farmers became squeezed between being able to
access “underutilized land”after the Great Recession, the popularity of and
political support for local food, their precarity once housing prices skyrocketed,
and that their work is not considered the “highest and best”use of land. As
Jean, a white native Denverite working on a grassroots urban agriculture initia-
tive growled,
I have been watching this for the last few years, and I now finally feel like my city’s been
invaded. I’m like who the fuck are all these people? Who are you people? You don’t respect
shit. And that’s me, the native in me. Like I’m watching my land disappear has been the story
for such a long time, but it’s true. So many of the people that I work with—artists, farmers,
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activists, long-timers—it’s like where the hell are we going to? People are getting kicked out.
They’re just getting shoved out […]it’s just a pay-to-play city, a pay-to-play region.
Jean is right that there is a quick, class-based shift in Denver, but while the indi-
vidual gentrifier might be easy to blame, economic, cultural, and political forces
better help to explain green gentrification, especially the contradictory location
of urban agriculture in the process.
The experience of the Urban Farmers Collaborative illustrates what revalori-
zation looks like at this mesolevel. In 2010, a group of farmers one non-
profit, Green Leaf Denver, and two for-profits, Granata Farms and Produce
Denver were guaranteed three years to farm the three-acre Sustainability
Park. This was extended to 2015 after which they had to find new locations.
While compared to developers these urban farmers hold less economic and polit-
ical power, their social and cultural capital as white and highly educated people
engaged in a popular practice allowed them to access land even if it was only for
a short time. But compared to the increased property value associated with
farming on this city block in the context of developer-led green gentrification,
they hold more economic and cultural power than some low-income residents
facing displacement pressures.
The farm sat on Denver Housing Authority (DHA) land, a historic site of
affordable housing going back to the 1930s. DHA is a quasi-municipal corpora-
tion that is subject to local housing laws and city and federal oversight. Its mis-
sion is to support affordable housing. However, rather than building affordable
housing on the property, it decided to land bank the property until the housing
market was strong. DHA could then sell it to a developer for more money.
While this speculative strategy may grow the resources necessary for DHA to
expand its affordable housing portfolio, it can also lead to gentrification in cer-
tain neighborhoods. According to a toolkit provided by the Housing and Urban
Development’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program, land banks are meant to
prevent “the contagious blight that can sweep across urban neighborhoods
like a plague, infecting house after house until whole blocks even
neighborhoods become empty and abandoned shadows of their former selves”
(Kildee & Hovey, 2010, p. 2). Land banks set aside property and can be used to
create “open green space or a community garden […] until a new purpose can
be determined”(Kildee & Hovey, 2010, p. 2).
Sustainability Park was planned by DHA to revalorize this former site of
affordable housing (Denver Housing Authority, n.d.). As journalist Scott
McFetridge (2015) sanguinely commented: “During the Great Recession, down-
town landowners and leaders offered up plots for free to get new vitality on
empty streets.”But with all the people clamoring to live in downtown Denver,
new housing development is far more profitable than farms. The land was sold
to Curtis Park Group, while the exclusive broker is TreeHouse Brokerage and
Development, which built S*Park, the condo and townhome project.
4
Seizing
the opportunity to co-opt the work of the Urban Farmers Collaborative,
S*Park’s website claims sustainability is the “ethos for the project”and that the
development is “celebrating the spirit of urban community and farming”with a
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“private park area”and “modern greenhouse.”Despite claims that the develop-
ment creates affordable housing (Rebchook, 2016), this project furthers exclu-
sionary gentrification. Out of the 41 units in the first phase of development, only
five were under US$350,000, and this is for the base model, studios between 500
and 600 square feet (S*Park, n.d.). Hoping to attract wealthier millennials and
young families to the neighborhood, S*Park’s website advertises environmental
amenities such as parks, public transportation, and walkability, as well as prox-
imity to hip restaurants and breweries. Upon being placed on the market, these
initial units sold almost immediately..
The history of the Urban Farmers Collaborative farm sits uneasily with
another fact. It was in Curtis Park, which is part of the historically Latinx and
black low-income neighborhood of Five Points. Since 2000, the demographics
have flipped from majority people of color to majority white. In 2000, Latinx
were 42.8 percent of the population, blacks accounted for 26.2 percent, while
non-Latinx whites accounted for 27.4 percent. In 2015, non-Latinx whites grew
to 64.5 percent of the population, while Latinx shrunk to 20.9 percent, and
blacks to 10.4 percent (Community Facts, n.d.). Moreover, the inflation-
adjusted average household income was US$49,175 in 2000 and almost doubled
in 2015 to US$81,029 (Community Facts, n.d.). The wealthier white people who
now live here can purchase cortados from places like ink! Coffee, which came
under fire in 2017 from longtime residents for its sign, “Happily gentrifying the
neighborhood since 2014.”They can also go to Uchi, the sushi restaurant
started by James Beard Award-winning chef Tyson Cole, an Austin, Texas suc-
cess that branched out to Denver. It is located at S*Park. As Cole remarked,
“We are always exploring new avenues to expand how we connect with food
and the community. Uchi’s proximity to the greenhouse space above the restau-
rant and the community garden at S*Park presents an amazing opportunity”
(Zeppelin, 2017). Which community? The one that will spend over US$100 a
person for a ten-course omakase tasting?
TO FARM OR NOT TO FARM, THAT IS, THE GREEN
GENTRIFICATION QUESTION
There is an acute sense among urban farmers that wealthier residents attracted
to the amenity of urban agriculture might displace working-class residents.
Some of the staff at GrowHaus, a multi-racial and multi-ethnic food justice
non-profit that works with the Latinx community of Elyria-Swansea to increase
healthy food access, jobs, and urban agriculture skills, talked about the possibil-
ity of their presence as a gentrifying force. Indeed, they are an outsider-founded
organization that developed deep local ties and inclusive leadership and have
remained in the same location for eight years. This work is complicated by the
fact that they acquired their organizational cornerstone, a large greenhouse,
during the trough of the Green Recession through real estate connections, a
space that has been pivotal to their positive local reputation. Reflecting on this
issue, Gary, a white staff member shared, “[I]t’s like uncovering this neighbor-
hood and are we in some way helping gentrification? Are we making it cool to
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be here? One of the things that we’ve talked about is what is the sort of tipping
point in which the residents we’re trying to serve are being pushed out of this
neighborhood and are we a part of that problem?”
Given these conditions, there is also the question of whether urban agricul-
ture can buck development pressures. In an interview the summer before they
closed after seven years of operation, Molly, a white representative of the com-
munity development non-profit Feed Denver, explained its culturally signifying
power related to local food trends: “[W]e are lucky and take advantage of our
environment because we have a huge gentrification issue happening, meaning a
lot of money moving in, and people who really don’t know these issues, but they
like the idea of eating local.”Although they had always maintained collabora-
tive relationships with Sunnyside’s working-class and Latinx residents, their
urban agriculture initiative became an environmental amenity. Speaking further
to the specific role of their farm and market, she added, “What’s happening now
is this not-valued piece of land that we’re on is now valued. We have a very nice
market and people will spend money at our market because we have people who
have a lot of money who have bought these houses that were going for
US$60,000 and now are going for US$600,000.”
Urban agriculture can be a contradictory greening event; initiatives like those
at GrowHaus and Feed Denver offer community and economic benefits for
those most at risk of displacement even as they serve to revalorize neighbor-
hoods. On the one hand, these initiatives leverage their cultural appeal to grow
food, increase food access, and create jobs for low-income people and increase
the visibility of cities that support local food. On the other hand, property infla-
tion makes it hard for urban farmers to find land, especially for a long period of
time, which can push initiatives into neighborhoods facing or experiencing gen-
trification or pull them if there is an opportunity to acquire land from develo-
pers. There is thus an interaction between these conditions at a neighborhood
level that avails green growth machines to reimagine and repurpose urban
agriculture.
In response, Denver’s food movement has sought to secure land to stabilize
urban food production and reduce the need to make compromises that entangle
urban farmers in green gentrification. While it has used its cultural and social
capital to resist being fully absorbed into the political economy of the housing
market, the cachet of local food and the valorization potential of urban agricul-
ture compels political elites to view them through the lens of economic develop-
ment. As I discuss further below, the experiences and perspectives of urban
agriculture advocates help articulate why this low-profit mode of production
will likely remain a precarious land use and a tool for green gentrification.
Local Food Boosters and the Precarity of Urban Agriculture
After a multi-year and multi-stakeholder outreach effort to learn what Denver
residents think the local food system should be like in 2030, Mayor Hancock
adopted the Denver Food Vision in 2017. This strategic policy tool contains
many goals that complement the 2020 Sustainability Goals, but more
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thoroughly articulates how to create an inclusive, healthy, economically vibrant,
regionally focused, and environmentally resilient food system (City of Denver,
2017). As part of its commitment to support local food production, it pledges to
preserve 99.2 acres of land for agricultural production. Even when compared to
the beginning of the end of agriculture in 1964 (419 acres), this modest goal rein-
forces the skepticism of many urban farmers that their work is precarious, espe-
cially given that this preserved land does not have to be in Denver.
As a point of comparison, a group of DSFPC members formed in 2015 to
work on an initiative to access more land for urban agriculture. Realizing that
accessing private land is expensive or relegates urban agriculture to marginal
places, they proposed converting 100 acres of public land to food production by
2020. Based on the estimates from Brett et al. (n.d.), which found that farming
on 766 acres would provide five common vegetables for all residents for a year,
the policy proposal claimed that urban agriculture would greatly benefit
Denver. They proposed that this land should be farmed in low-income commu-
nities with a guaranteed lease of three to five years and revenue-neutral for
public agencies with the food producer bearing most infrastructure costs.
Although imperfect in that it could encourage further gentrification, privatize
costs for an economically marginal occupation, and guarantee land tenure for a
very short time, it was better than the land preservation goal of the Denver
Food Vision.
Many urban farmers believe that the major planning documents avoid
making policy changes that seriously increase the scale of land access and food
production within Denver. For example, in 2015, Colorado State University
(CSU) hosted a summit called “Advancing the Agriculture Economy Through
Innovation,”where both Governor Hickenlooper and Denver Mayor Hancock
spoke of the significance of urban food systems and the Northern Colorado
urban corridor as a zone of innovation. Agricultural reporter Luke Runyon
(2015) summarized the growth machine values driving the definition of urban
food system innovation by referencing a CSU-produced report that drove the
summit: “The equation for the growth sounds something like: universities plus
entrepreneurs minus regulation multiplied by high quality of life equals innova-
tion.”
5
Urban farmers view these elite gatherings and reports with suspicion.
“The Governor is declaring that Colorado is a leader […] particularly in urban
farming, and I wanted to throw up,”exclaimed Sherry, a white for-profit farmer
who was part of the Urban Farmers Collaborative. “I thought, ‘What are you
talking about? […]’When was the last time somebody said, ‘We’ll give you a
subsidy if you’re an urban farmer.’So, for me the political context is mostly dis-
ingenuous. They’re sound bites, they sound good, and there’s very little reality.”
Feelings that urban agriculture is precarious were shared broadly. As a white
university-affiliated member of the DSFPC named John explained, “Denver is
going through such a boom right now, which is kind of the history of Colorado.
There are booms and busts, dating back to silver […]. What has really impacted
the [local] food system is there used to be vacant land that people could farm on
and now that’s getting turned into condos.”Quite simply, he argued, “We’re in
a land rush right now and if you don’t have money, there is no crop that can
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compete with condos.”The reality of land insecurity directly translates into
urban farmers questioning the investments that they are willing to make. There
is a conflict between investing time, labor, and resources such as plants and tools
and how this valorizes the property for future sale. Eli, a white representative of
a non-profit farm that works with a private school, lamented the inevitability of
being “kicked off this land”because they “invested so much in this particular
soil […]. We add compost every year for every season. It’s local compost.”He
expressed this view because land is expensive in Denver and “when we get
kicked off of here, we are not going to find two acres.”Their insecurity is height-
ened because they are on a year-to-year lease. Moreover, the land costs two
million dollars. Eli admitted, “I mean, look at those houses. The property value
is so high that it doesn’t make sense for farmers to currently set up operation in
the city.”Asked what they would do when kicked off the land, he said they
wanted to integrate themselves as much as possible with the school. “Trying to
add value to our property holder is the strategy.”The “greening”of Denver
with local food and urban agriculture initiatives has not been as beneficial or
free from contradiction as farmers would have liked. Economic valorization
often exploits social and cultural symbols that code practices and places as
green, trendy, or cool.
CONCLUSION: CAN URBAN AGRICULTURE RESIST
GREEN GENTRIFICATION?
The precipitating event of the Great Recession and its subsequent aftermath
helps to explain how urban agriculture became entangled in the process of green
gentrification in Denver. The foreclosure crisis drove down real estate prices,
which opened up the opportunity for urban farmers to access more land and for
investors to strategically employ urban agriculture in the revalorization of neigh-
borhoods. At the same time, local government intervened with initiatives to
attract new capital and residents and to support those on the social and eco-
nomic margins. Among these initiatives were the 2020 Sustainability Goals and
the Denver Food Vision, both of which aim to achieve the triple bottom line of
economic, environmental, and social sustainability. For the local food move-
ment, these were institutional acknowledgments of its cultural value to the city.
Yet, for urban farmers, the influx of wealthy residents into low-income and
working-class neighborhoods increased housing pressures and accelerated exclu-
sionary gentrification. This undercut each sustainability goal in particular places
and ways. Economically and socially, local residents and urban farmers have
been displaced as wealthier newcomers reap the benefits of their work. The irony
is that the popularity of the idea that urban agriculture will increase local food
access as a mechanism to advance sustainability can undercut the producers and
intended low-income consumers of this food, that while perhaps abundant in
cultural capital lack the economic capital of green growth machines.
The trends I have identified in this article are similar throughout the United
States (Alkon, Kato, & Sbicca, 2018). They therefore offer an opportunity to
consider several conditions under which urban agriculture is more or less likely
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to lead to green gentrification. I urge other scholars to test these hypotheses to
further explain the contradictory economic and cultural location of urban agri-
culture in rapidly changing cities.
First, green gentrification is more likely to benefit from urban agriculture
when a large rent gap emerges after an economic recession. A devaluation in
property values can spur green growth machines to seek out initiatives that are
capable of revalorizing neighborhoods. Urban farmers operate on thin margins
so they are susceptible to filling into underutilized or abandoned plots of land.
There is thus a match made by necessity.
Second, cultural mechanisms like the popularity of local food work in tan-
dem with political economy mechanisms like the rent gap. Just like Zukin (1987)
found that culture and capital are mutually constitutive conditions that drive
gentrification, urban agriculture is more likely to support green gentrification
when developers exploit its cultural appeal to produce a profit. Thus, the process
of revalorization requires the cultural and social capital afforded to well-
positioned urban farming initiatives to convince visitors and newcomers to a dis-
invested neighborhood that it is an “attractive”or “up-and-coming”place.
Third, local government can play an essential role in facilitating how urban
agriculture contributes to green gentrification. If public planning documents
only support local food production on paper without clear mechanisms to create
long-term stable access to land for urban farmers, then developers and real
estate brokers can co-opt projects that are meant to serve residents at risk of dis-
placement. In contrast, if local government passes policies that explicitly work
to halt or slow exclusionary gentrification, like requiring developments to meet
community food needs in their project design or protecting urban agriculture
from development, then green gentrification is less likely (Cohen, 2018).
Fourth, the more neoliberal a governance network, the more likely that local
food movements will be unable to resist the greenwashing of urban agriculture
by development interests (Alkon, 2018). Non-profits fill in the gaps produced by
the roll-back of social welfare support and political aversion to mandating living
wages and fair housing policies, which aligns with many of the reasons why local
government supports social service oriented urban agriculture. Conversely, for-
profit urban farms often contend in a context of land scarcity where developers
can profit more from building houses than from producing food. In brief, with-
out explicit policies by local government to intervene in housing markets and
land use decisions that work to embed the economy in equitable social relations,
then urban agriculture initiatives will more likely support green gentrification.
Fifth, setting aside a small amount of public land is a release valve for deal-
ing with the land insecurity of urban farmers and will not reduce the threat of
urban agriculture becoming a tool for green gentrification. Instead of checking
the power of developers and boom/bust investment and housing cycles, this
token support may instead dull deeper political action and divide urban farming
initiatives further along race and class lines (Reynolds & Cohen, 2016). It also
would not eliminate the underlying dilemma that urban agriculture faces in a
capitalist context, namely its cultural and economic value to green growth
machines.
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Together, these hypotheses point to the significance of determining whether
political economy, culture, or both explain the use of urban agriculture in the
process of revalorizing certain neighborhoods to produce exclusionary gentrifi-
cation. They also suggest that this process is open, so different contexts might
show how the degree and kind of relationship between urban agriculture and
green gentrification is more important than discovering a universal explanation.
By examining the nuanced relationships between neighborhood investment and
resident opportunities, cultural and social dispositions, and urban housing and
planning policy, we can push beyond seeing green gentrification as “good”or
“bad”and perhaps discover strategies that are “just green enough”(Curran &
Hamilton, 2012;Schlichtman et al. 2017).
In cities facing entrenched environmental and social inequalities, residents
are looking for ways to ameliorate their worst effects with practices like urban
agriculture that might also generate social and economic development. At the
same time, green growth machines have found ways to use such practices to
attract new residents and new capital. While sustainability initiatives are becom-
ing more common, there is still the question of who benefits from green gentrifi-
cation and whether it will inevitably produce exclusionary outcomes. Urban
agriculture can feed people and take care of farmers, or it can be fed to develo-
pers to generate profit. It remains to be seen how cities navigate this tension in
the years to come.
NOTES
1. See, for instance, special issues on gentrification in Urban Studies in 2008 and City
and Community in 2016.
2. Michelle Obama led the way on getting the White House Vegetable Garden planted
in 2009. Also, social reformers have long used urban agriculture to respond to crisis, such
as war, economic recession, and deteriorating public health (Lawson, 2005).
3. Between 1990 and 2008, there were 109 articles in the Denver Post mentioning
“urban agriculture,”“urban farm,”or “community garden.”This more than doubled to
240 between 2009 and 2017.
4. Curtis Park Group was founded in 2015. Jonathan Alpert and Clem Reinhardt
founded Tree House together in 2012. The Curtis Park Group includes Jonathan Alpert.
5. The report by Graff, Berklund, and Rennels (2014) is titled The Emergence of an
Innovation Cluster in the Agricultural Value Chain along Colorado’s Front Range.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to extend my gratitude to all the people working in Denver to improve the local
food system amid complex pressures, of which gentrification is quite pressing. Thank you
for sharing your experiences and perspectives. I also want to express my appreciation for
the thoughtful comments and suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers. You helped
me discern a few key ways to strengthen this article. Obviously, any mistakes or over-
sights are my own.
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