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Chickens in the City

Anthony Flint | Mar 11th, 2010 | Topics: Governance, Culture | Region: Midwest | Cities: Cleveland | 3

Credit: iLoveButter

This is a companion article to “Cleveland’s Comeback,” a feature article appearing in Issue 26 of NAC, available now. To read the full text of that article, by Marc Lefkowitz, click here.

With its “chicken and bee” zoning, Cleveland is trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Like other cities, notably Detroit, confronted with rampant home foreclosures and vacant parcels, hundreds of acres of urban land are lying fallow. In the 77-square-mile area within city limits, there are currently 18,000 vacant lots totaling 3,500 acres. While the primary goal is neighborhood redevelopment – including an emphasis on arts and entertainment and building on anchor institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic and universities—the city has also launched several initiatives to try to encourage activity despite dwindling population and stalled private-sector activity.

Among them: stabilizing vacant lots with urban gardens and native plantings, demolition of structures while maintaining foundations to allow the construction of greenhouses, allowing sideyard expansion, and using vacant lots for geo-thermal wells to heat neighboring structures. But perhaps the most interesting effort is re-writing zoning to allow urban farming—dramatically reducing setback requirements for chicken coops and beehives on empty parcels, and clarifying the process for allowing such uses.

The city is considering going even further, relaxing rules for raising roosters, turkeys, geese, goats, pigs, and sheep, and possibly including new agricultural overlay districts for more intensive urban farming. Robert N. Brown, director of the Cleveland City Planning Commission, speaking at an annual convening of city planning directors from the nation’s 30 largest cities sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the American Planning Association, and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, said that zoning would not be changed to accommodate processing or slaughtering, but that urban farming was seen as an appropriate use of the vacant land for now.

Urban farming has brought Cleveland to the cutting edge in the trend of local food – and addressing the “food deserts” recently publicized by First Lady Michelle Obama. A farmer’s market has sprouted up in a neighborhood pockmarked with desolation, making eggs, vegetables, honey and other farm-fresh products from backyards and vacant lots available to residents.

Not everyone is happy. One member of City Council fretted about people “setting up Green Acres in their backyard” and turning “my neighborhood into a scene from ‘Deliverance.’” But Brown says that in the first year of the “chicken and bee” ordinance in 2009, there were 14 applications for permits or licenses, mainly for backyard chicken coops, and only two complaints – both regarding the keeping of pigs, and none about chickens or bees.

The City Planning Commission, with support of Living Cities, is currently partnering with two Cleveland non-profits—Neighborhood Progress and ParkWorks —along with the Kent State University Urban Design Collaborative, to design more programs for the sustainable re-use of vacant land in Cleveland.

“Our goal is to make productive use of Cleveland’s growing supply of ‘vacated’ land,” Brown says. “With a smaller population occupying the same land area, the city’s future could be somewhat ‘suburban.’  But we recognize that Cleveland will never out-suburb the suburbs. Our goal is to enhance our urban character and make it more competitive by creating dense, mixed-use urban clusters made more desirable by proximity to such open space uses as urban gardens and urban farms.”

Anthony Flint is a Boston-based writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

foreclosures food deserts cleveland living cities michelle obama apa vacant land bee and chicken zoning lincoln institute of land policy parkworks kent state anthony flint neighborhood progress