Urban farming = Job growth?

I recently read about plans to change Detroit's zoning to permit urban farming on the Mother Nature Network. I'm all for urban gardening/farming, but I increasingly find that I am questioning the rationale behind it:

...

In Detroit, where zoning laws ban growing crops and raising livestock for profit, city planner Kathryn Lynch Underwood is part of a work group rewriting the regulations and defining what kinds of urban farms might need more oversight.

"The city has not been treating it as an illegal use or a nuisance because it has been a good thing," Underwood said.

She is hopeful that urban agriculture and the city's nearly 1,000 community gardens will create good jobs in a city that desperately needs them and put vacant lots to use in blighted neighborhoods.

...

 (You can read the full article here:
http://www.mnn.com/food/farms-gardens/stories/urban-farmers-fight-to-sow-green-biz)

This leaves me wondering, just how will small inefficient farms/gardens "create good jobs in a city that desperately needs them"? Farming has been notoriously unprofitable and often pays among the lowest wage scale.

According to a study done by Rene P. Rosenbaum, Associate Professor Department of Resource Development, at Michigan State University [pdf], residential seasonal farmworkers in Lenawee County earned $5,057 on average in 1996. I think it is fairly safe to assume that anyone creating an urban farm is likely to employ residential seasonal workers (if anyone) or migrants, which according to the same survey earned $2,228 for the season. These are clearly not "good" jobs, and they're only seasonal at that.

Often it seems that environmentalists are considered blasphemous if they say anything negative about urban farming.  Particularly because there are wonderful programs like Capuchin's Earthworks Urban Farm that provide a terrific service (and food!) on a non-profit basis.  However, for-profit, large-scale, urban farms strike me as a sort of goofy response to the food deserts that are many of our urban centers.  Is farming in the middle of a city really the best use of that land? I know the argument is that the blighted land is not being used now and it’s a wasteland of urban decay, so why not? Farming would certainly fill that land. I don't really have a good response to that, but the point is that farming is not an economic solution.  It is simply a subsidized solution to filling vacant space.

My grandfather's roughly 170-acre farm in rural Iowa was sliced up when a road was needed as Des Moines sprawled, then cut in half again when the gas company decided they needed to run a pipeline through it in the mid 1990's. After several years of court battles, his farmland was cut into three distinct chunks with strips that could not be farmed because they were claimed by eminent domain for the state and gas company. If we as a country can't keep from splitting up farms in Iowa, what kind of convoluted thinking leads to believing that a farm in an urban center is going to remain intact after the next resurgence of Detroit?

I think encouraging urban farming/gardening as supplemental income or a hobby is a terrific contribution to the need for more fresh veggies in urban centers and as an educational tool for kids. Moreover, I completely agree the zoning laws should be fixed such that urban gardens can be planted, produce sold at markets, and the owners not put themselves at risk of being hauled into court battles. However, expecting it to be a source of "good job" growth or that these could be profitable, generational farms strikes me as borderline delusional.

Michigan's Nutty Schools Count Day

Michigan counts students on two days (yesterday was worth 80% and one day in Feb. from last school year is worth 20%).  This is then used as a basis for calculating student populations that is used for deciding funding.  I find "count day" to be a particularly annoying and disingenuous part of the school year in Michigan for two reasons:

First, if you are truly trying to figure out how many students attend a school, counting them on two days a year is going to produce a skewed result.  In other words, its not a statistically valid way to measure the population that actually attends the school when that population is artificially inflated (or at least can be).  I know they are trying to measure the census (that's everyone) that should be in the schools. But statistically speaking, the schools are only teaching a sample of the census.  So to be accurate, they should be measuring the samples. 

The second annoying part is, if you have to entice students to show up for school with TVs (does that strike anyone else as ironic?), laptops, and Ipods, then maybe you actually don't need the funding for these students?  And just out of curiosity, who is paying for that big screen TV and other electronics?  Does that come out of the school budget?  Is there a $10,000 "Count Day Prize Budget"?  No, actually there is a $500,000 "count day" budget (sort of).

I know. I get it.  It's all about school funding and school choice.  And don't get me wrong, I don't want to see funding fall for Detroit Public Schools... lord knows they can't afford to lose any more cash, and we as a state certainly don't spend enough on inner-city schools to begin with.  And, yeah, the current system is designed to be stacked in favor of large urban school systems (DPS isn't the only one with these count day incentives).  It's much easier to bolster attendance for two days rather than 40 or 50 days.  But, if you want school funding based on accuracy, then this isn't the way to do it.

I am annoyed by the prizes, but the $500,000 budget isn't actually just to get kids into school for one day.  It's a campaign to have parents choose to keep their kids in DPS. In that sense, this is probably a good way to spend money.  However, aiming for this one day, well, that's ridiculous.

I'm happy to say that DPS Emergency Financial Manager, Robert Bobb, appears to understand this.  He told WDIV:

...he’d continually fight to keep students in the district, including contacting parents to reassure them of the quality education their children get in a DPS school.
“Those are the parents we are going to start reaching out to throughout the year," Bobb said. "For all those children that are leaving the district and moving to other schools, our campaign will continue."

Well, I hope he does continue to fight.  And to keep him honest, if I were in control, I drop this "count day" nonsense.  I'd make it "count weeks" (one or two weeks a month for as many months as I could get) and then calculate the daily average to use as a base for the funding. 

The other side benefit to doing it this, is IF you can get more kids to come to one particular school AND show up for school during count weeks, then you might actually get some consistency and be able teach them something too (and isn't that really the point??) --  note the big "if".

Obviously, if you are going to do this, then you have to address the funding disparity between suburban schools and inner-city schools.  One thought on this might be to dump the separate school systems funding as they are now.  Why not shift to funding based on county-wide counts, instead of separate districts?  Heck, while we're at it, why not dump the separate districts all together and make county-wide districts?  I know, parents at every other Wayne County school district will pitch a fit at having to help clean up the mess and corruption at DPS.... 

Anyway, that's obviously a whole different can of worms.  However, with the state teetering on the brink of insolvency (or should that be tumbling over the edge?), I have to wonder if there is an opportunity here to change either Count Day or even the school system structure to help DPS make the most of substantially smaller state funding overall.

Positively Detroit!

This article is a little off topic for me, but there's been a lot of talk about it recently so I'll try and tie it back in at the end...

Author and columnist, Mitch Albom recently wrote an article in Sports Illustrated about Detroit. Detroit's been in the news a lot recently (not in a particularly positive light, unfortunately), and it seems that Mitch was attempting to counter that news. A good friend of mine, Jamie pointed me to a reply to Albom by Jim Boyle in Model D. Unfortunately, Model D won't get the same visibility as SI (or even probably the reprint of the article in Detroit Free Press), but I wish it would because I think both articles are important.

I've never been a big fan of Albom's writing style, but I think that both his article and Boyle's article say similar things about the city. I think the difference is tone. While both articles do point out positive things about the city, I didn't read either as particularly positive in tone. Boyle spends more time on specific neighborhood places that are positive - Albom spends more time on the sports (obviously, its in SI), big development, and ends with the general hopeful attitude of Detroit.

But unfortunately, both also spend a lot of time in negativity - Albom about the city ruins, Boyle about Mitch's attitude. Both seems somewhat self-defeating to me.

End of the day, I think these speak about different Detroiters - to me it seemed that both articles missed the demographic cohorts that the other picked up, and both are necessary to get a better picture of the whole. To paraphrase my friend Jamie, he said that these articles serve to divide Detroiters, while we should be spending more time trying to unify the two Detroits. So, this is where I can tie it back into branding - what we have are different brands for Detroit:
The Albom brand of a sports, ghost town with many problems, but a big can-do attitude.
The Boyle brand of an up-and-coming city filled with energy and activity.

Both are valid, but as Jamie points out we need some unification. Those trying to brand Detroit probably were pulling their hair out as they read these (both published just as the country started focusing on the North American Auto Show in Detroit). Wouldn't it be nice if we could come up with a simple, unifying theme for Detroit that shows both of these two Detroits?

How does the high-powered executive, the auto worker, the creative class professional, and the homeless guy with the mattress in the church came together? When do they come together? Tough questions, but in Detroit I believe they are coming together in some way. In the past that tie has been automobiles - they were the glue that brought everyone together in work and in play - but as that seems to be fading, we need to find that new identity.