The Spring 2010 issue of Next American City mag features an extensive piece on vacant land reuse practices in Cle.
Here’s how the article begins:
Sharon Glaspie and her Garden Boyz are at the center of a new movement to repurpose vacant land in Cleveland, a city racing to reinvent itself. Three years ago Glaspie leased a quarter-acre from the Cleveland Land Bank, which manages 3,300 acres of vacant land, or 7 percent of the city’s total acreage. She found six neighborhood teenagers to share what she had recently learned about growing and selling food. Now the Garden Boyz arrive promptly at 7 a.m. every morning to work the soil and to tend and harvest collard greens, carrots, onions and other popular sellers at the weekend farmers markets in Central, a neighborhood where more than half of families live below the poverty line and often pay with food stamps. If they weren’t learning how to garden and run a business, Glaspie says, the Garden Boyz would most likely be indoctrinated in drug gangs.