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why the next four years are critical for Yesler Terrace
BY HEIDI BROADHEAD
PHOTOS BY DELLA CHEN
On a rainy Saturday in March, the resilient Yesler Terrace Urban Demonstration farm, like the neighboring Freeway P-Patch garden and other spots around the soon-to-be-redeveloped Yesler Terrace neighborhood, showed the first signs of spring. That morning, a small crew of volunteers harvested the remaining winter greens and walked them up to the Food Not Bombs drop at the Yesler Terrace community center, where youth leaders from the GroundUp Organics program have been delivering fresh produce every Saturday at noon since June 2010. In the afternoon, volunteers planted some cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower starts donated from a recent Tilth plant sale.
Program Director Karen Toering, who has been with the program since it started in December 2009, shoveled wood chips from mulched tree branches that came from another part of the property into a wheelbarrow, which the volunteers will spread between the rows. She talked about composting and growing, the cycle they are trying to perpetuate in this community by working with its youth.
“We all think we're doing something new, but there's something very old about it, right? We have to re-teach it to every generation, with the assumption that they will teach their children.”
This was a quieter scene than last October, when GroundUp hosted a Saturday volunteer work day with nine youth leaders, a few adult staff members, and several adult volunteers from the community, who together harvested 80 pounds of delicious greens, basil, tomatoes, potatoes, beets, and celery for Food not Bombs, and planted crops for the winter.
By the time this second class of youth leaders (high-school age students who are hired as paid interns as they work toward a Master Composter certification) started in September, GroundUp Organics had developed into a robust training program, with students meeting after school and on Saturdays for 12 weeks. Their first weekend they went on a field trip to Mossy Rock, a farm south of Olympia.
“We had them help at a farm so they could experience urban environment and rural environment. They're getting both,” says Stephanie Snyder, who was on the staff of GroundUp last fall and who also coordinates the Just Garden project, an organization that helps build community gardens for low-income communities city-wide.
“They get to know each other when they come in, and from the first day they’re doing physical work together,” says Snyder. “It builds connections to others and to the land.”
Youth leaders experienced a wide variety of field trips, visits from representatives of the department of agriculture, and weekly guest chefs who taught the youth how to cook with the food they harvested from the garden.
Instead of taking on another class in the spring, GroundUp moved ahead with planting at the farm, using a skeleton crew of the adult staff (mostly unpaid) who worked with the program in 2010 and a few youth leaders from last fall who are still volunteering at the farm to fulfill their certification requirements. A handful of Seattle University students worked the farm as part of a service learning project, and GroundUp recruited volunteers from the community to help out at weekly Saturday work parties, which ran from March to June, when GroundUp starts its summer program for middle school and high school kids from around the community.
This summer, they will move closer to their original vision of self-sufficiency by partnering with several Central Area organizations including Community Kitchens, Cortona Coffee, Clean Greens, and Tilth's United People's Farm to create a farm stand at Yesler Terrace.
“Our goal is to become self-sustaining,” says Toering, and they are hoping that the income generated from a farm stand, as well as their ability to create their own soil through composting from Yesler Terrace waste, will help them become less reliant on grants and institutional funding.
At the beginning of the season last year, they brought in 20 yards of organic soil to start the farm. This year Toering estimates they will only need to bring in 5, and by next year they’ll generate their own.
GroundUp’s focus this year is to gather data that will help them present the program to the Seattle Housing Authority not only as a model for onsite food and composting within a large urban community, but also as an integrated part of the community as it undergoes massive restructuring under the five to ten-year plan to rebuild the nearly 70-year-old Yesler Terrace as a high-density sustainable community using green design practices.
“Our hope is to have a permanent presence at Yesler,” says Toering. “You can have a LEED building but if you don't have a LEED janitor and LEED occupants, how do you keep it going?”
The Yesler Terrace redevelopment moved forward substantially in late 2010 and early 2011 with the Environmental Impact Study (EIS) process. After evaluating a few options with varying levels of density, in January 2011 Seattle Housing Authority identified a “preferred alternative”—the option with the highest level of density—with 5,000 housing units (low-income and market-rate), 900,000 square feet of office space, 88,000 square feet of retail space, and 6.5 acres of parks and potential gardens.
Neither the preliminary development plan nor the final EIS released in April addressed urban farming or replacing the existing farm or p-patch gardens with any degree of specificity. Questions and suggestions received during the public comment process on the EIS were met primarily with vague statements that touched briefly on these topics without addressing them directly: “potential sustainable features are identified including urban agriculture…. opportunities could be created as part of redevelopment…new P-patch Community Gardens could be provided onsite… ”
Ryan Moore, the Seattle Housing Authority’s Senior Housing Developer, explains that the delay in committing to space for gardens is due primarily to bigger logistical questions that arose during the EIS process—where the roads would go, where the high-rise buildings could go, and where the tenants could be relocated during the project—which have precluded any specific design decisions.
“Urban agriculture isn't a low priority for us,” says Moore. “It's just that we don't want to go much further with the design in case something needs to change for some unforeseen reason.”
While SHA and its consultants haven’t completed any specific plans, Moore indicated that they have talked about the south slope—the steep hillside overlooking Jackson Street just below the current GroundUp farm site—as a potential area for terraced gardens. SHA is looking to the community garden at Rainier Vista, near the corner of Oregon Street and Renton Avenue—with concrete retaining walls and steep, terraced planting beds—as a model.
If they go with a terraced garden, Moore said it would be developed by the Department of Neighborhoods as part of their P-Patch program, and while it would probably be reserved for residents of Yesler Terrace it is unclear what space will be available for GroundUp to continue growing food.
The City Council will likely review a re-zoning plan in August or September, at which point SHA will be able to complete a detailed site plan, and have a better sense of available space for replacement gardens. Moore anticipates that site design will be completed by the end of 2011. The earliest possible start date for construction—which is likely to occur on property east of Boren Street—is late 2013.
Given this timeline, GroundUp only has 4 to 5 more years on the farm to establish their presence at Yesler Terace. Despite this uncertainty, Toering and the other food and social justice activists behind GroundUp continue to be dedicated to the transformative possibilities of this program.
“Our goal is to green the culture,” she says, “It’s about thinking past the build and into the culture—education, re-education, reinforcement—keep the mentality going. There's a life's worth of work to do here.”
Heidi Broadhead is a freelance writer based in Seattle.
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