The Land Under Philadelphia's Growing Spaces

I have spent enough afternoons walking Philadelphia blocks to know a garden when I see one, whether it is fenced in chain link and stubbornness or planted out like somebody built a front yard on a corner lot that used to be nothing at all. This city grows more food inside its own limits than most people who live here realize, and in 2023 Philadelphia finally counted it. The number the city landed on is 450 active agricultural spaces, spread across nearly 130 acres, built from input the city gathered from 650 residents and growers who actually work the dirt. I run Concrete Greens, an indoor farm here in Philadelphia, and I want to talk about that number honestly, including the part of it that does not flatter me.

The Number Nobody Argues With

The plan is called Growing from the Root, and the name tells you who actually wrote it. It came out of a real partnership, with Philadelphia Parks and Recreation sitting across the table from Soil Generation, a coalition of Philadelphia growers and advocates organized around land equity, and Interface Studio, a Philadelphia city planning firm that does its public engagement work in the open rather than behind a conference room door.

Four hundred fifty spaces. Nearly one hundred thirty acres. Six hundred fifty residents and experts who sat for interviews, filled out surveys, and told the city what was actually true about growing food here. Those are not marketing numbers. They are what a city gets when it actually goes and counts something instead of estimating it, and they cover individual plots, community gardens, school gardens, and market farms, the whole range of what growing food in a rowhouse city looks like.

What Land Security Actually Means

Every plan like this names goals, and this one puts land security first. Farm Philly, the city’s own urban agriculture program, describes the plan’s opening goal as increasing land security for growers, expanding access to growing space in every neighborhood, and protecting stewardship of the land itself. That ordering is not an accident. Ask anyone who has kept a garden alive on a Philadelphia lot for a decade what worries them most, and land security is usually the first thing out of their mouth, not the last.

Ash Richards, Farm Philly’s Director of Urban Agriculture, said it about as plainly as it can be said, in a piece for Grid Philadelphia: the seeds, the tools, the compost, none of it matters if the ground under a grower can be pulled out from under them. City Councilmember Kendra Brooks put a sharper point on it in the same piece, saying plainly that the Land Bank currently does not function for gardeners or gardens. I am not going to pretend that is a comfortable sentence for a city agency to sit with, but it is the sentence on the record, from an elected official, about a real and ongoing problem.

The Land Bank, One Year At A Time

The Philadelphia Land Bank is supposed to be the main door between a vacant, city owned lot and the person willing to turn it into food. In practice, it is a narrow door. Grounded in Philly, a project of the Public Interest Law Center that walks growers through exactly how to get permission to use city land, lays the terms out plainly. A community garden lease through the Land Bank runs up to one year, approved by the Land Bank’s own board. Anything longer than a year, any renewal, any purchase option, needs the sign off of your district council member on top of that.

One year is barely a full growing season, let alone a planning cycle. The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported on growers and council members criticizing the Land Bank for slow processing times and for not having dedicated staff who understand green space at all, let alone urgently. None of that is a knock on the people working inside that department. It reads more like a system built for one problem, tax delinquent houses, being asked to also solve a different problem it was never designed for, which is giving somebody enough security in the ground to plant something they will not see mature for years.

What An Indoor Farm Does Not Do

I want to say this as directly as I can, because it would be easy for a post about Concrete Greens to slide into pretending otherwise. An indoor farm does not solve land justice. It never gets to claim that, and I am not going to let it. Land justice means the people who have kept Philadelphia’s community gardens alive for twenty and thirty years, often without ever holding clean title to the ground, actually getting secure ownership or a lease long enough to plan around. That fight belongs to Soil Generation, to Farm Philly, to the growers themselves, and to whichever council members are willing to spend political capital moving Land Bank parcels toward the people already tending them. Concrete Greens is not that fight, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of self serving framing that erodes trust the moment anyone looks closely.

A Different Kind Of Tenure

What an indoor farm actually holds is a different kind of tenure entirely. Concrete Greens operates out of a building. We sign a lease like any other tenant, we occupy a fixed footprint, and nobody at the Land Bank board has to approve our right to keep growing past twelve months. That sounds like a small distinction until you think about what it lets us do that a grower on a one year lot agreement cannot responsibly do, which is make a forward commitment. If a wholesale buyer wants a standing order of greens for February, we can sign it, because we know that in February we will still be standing in the same building on the same lease. A grower whose Land Bank agreement is up for renewal in October cannot make that same promise in good conscience, not because of any lack of skill or will, only because the ground under them is not guaranteed to still be theirs when February comes.

That is not a criticism of the grower. It is a description of two different kinds of tenure solving two different kinds of problems, one measured in acres and years, the other in square footage and a signature on a commercial lease.

Complement, Not Replacement

Concrete Greens exists as a revenue generating, mission driven operation, not a charity and not a venture capital story. The model is meant to break even on operations and put its surplus toward Philadelphia’s food insecure neighborhoods, growing local food year round in a way that does not depend on a growing season or a lease renewal date. That only works standing next to the 450 growing spaces this city already has, never standing in for them. Philadelphia does not need to choose between community gardens with real land security and buildings that grow food indoors on a fixed lease. It needs both, funded and defended on their own separate terms, because they are answering two different questions. One is about who owns the ground. The other is about who can promise a wholesale buyer a delivery in February. Confusing the two helps nobody, and treating them as competitors helps nobody either.

Four hundred fifty growing spaces deserve real, secure ground under them, on terms that outlast a single growing season. Go read Growing from the Root, and then look at what your own neighborhood is actually holding onto, and for how long.