Score! Capitalism Wins Again!

from BoingBoing:

For thirteen years, in the depressed inner city of south central LA, 250 families have been feeding themselves on with organic fruits and vegetables grown on a farm that was once completely paved and considered completely useless for growing anything on.

The farm has almost zero fossil fuel imput and zero transport cost. It's a model the whole world should be copying, but instead the city has decided to give them an eviction notice. The sheriff's office delivered the notice on March 1st. This farm does great things, and its in everybody's best interest that it survive.

The city wants to replace it with a Wal-Mart.

see the eviction notice and more

Comments

[geomatic1]

Actually, it's in everybody's interest that the economic benefit of any commercial enterprise in a blighted inner city area far outweighs the benefit of a small scale "farm" for local residents. Besides, one of our basic rights is to use our private property as we see fit, within zoning laws. Let's see, tomatoes or jobs...

[jlt]

But what about PUBLIC property?

And by "everybody's interest," other than Walmart shareholders, who exactly benefits? Can you actually name a single community where Walmart has been for more than five years where the poorest 20% of the community has actually benefited AT ALL?

Walmart may be beneficial to new and growing communities and sprawl development. However, I've never heard of a single case where Walmart went into an infill position and actually increased anyone's quality of life. They may generate a number of low-income poverty-level jobs, but they remove even more jobs from the community and make that profit exit the community even faster.

[Jef]

Not a Wallmart, a *warehouse* mostly for a wallmart.
safe, fresh, healthy food, or a warehouse. hmmm

soul-killing jobs, or good healthy hard work with meaning. hmmm

I also would not call a 14 acre farm run by 350 families small scale.
maybe in relation to the sick factory farms we have these days that produce large nutritionaly deficient products...

in fact everybody's interest would be far better served by investment in organic urban agriculture...or i suppose that we could assume that energy will remain dirt cheap forever, and that externalities of our current energy producing system don't exist, and that the current intensive farming methods are sustainiable and make healthy vegetables.... mercy.

[geomatic1]

Jeez people, from your vitriol you would think WalMart is the greatest evil we face. I'm no fan of the place either, but I am arguing that any commercial development, whether Trader Joe's or a Korean owned "bodega", or even an Albertson's makes more sense in the fact that jobs are created and the tax base grows, spurring more local improvements. Besides, this is still PRIVATE property we are talking about. And if you are 16 and unemployed, do you care that it is WalMart or Circle K that gives you a job? We need capitalism to make this work, because socialism just doesn't cut it, just ask Fidel...

[jlt]

Actually, socialism seems to work fine in 25 other countries you didn't mention, but that's beside the point.

And Walmart does not actually expand the tax base; profits are taken out of the community while locally owned businesses are closed and their employees rehired at lower wages and less benefits by Walmart, effectively turning the community into a client state for a large corporation.

Of course, that's only the past pattern. I suppose it could work another way - it just doesn't very often.

[Jake Johansen]

For a real article on this issue, by real journalists at a real news publication, check out The NewStandard's coverage of the South Central Gardens crisis at http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/3027

[gaela]

thank you jake... ouch.
we, on the other hand, are a real blog, for real bloggers,
just in case you misunderstood, everyone.

[kirino]

maybe a stupid question, did darryl Hannah hide in a tree to protest against the commercial development?

[jlt]

I don't think she has any problem with commercial development; I got the idea that she was simply trying to keep the farm from being completely destroyed. In this case the development and the farm may be mutually exclusive possibilities, but that doesn't mean that she's against commercial development.