When my great grandfather moved to San Jose from Sweden in 1928, the area was an agricultural powerhouse, with orchards dominating the landscape. Santa Clara County is blessed with some of the best weather and growing conditions in the country.
As the area evolved into Silicon Valley, the orchards were replaced with homes and businesses. The value of knowing where your food is grown was overshadowed by the priorities of urban development.
As San Jose continues to grow over the next decade, the city can still retain its rustic charm amid the modern development. Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones offer the path.
As a family involved in real estate and development for generations, we are constantly looking at trends and new opportunities. In 2012, my father Barry Swenson met Zach Lewis, who was writing his masters thesis in urban planning and pitched the idea of putting a farm on a vacant lot. Why let vacant land sit idle and pay to maintain it when it can be a productive space for growing food in San Jose?
We worked with Zach to identify land we didn’t plan to develop in the next several years. In 2013, Garden to Table started Taylor Street Farm on one of our vacant lots. It has been a positive experience to be part of helping the farm and organization grow, and the community appreciates the events, workshops and market stand days.
State legislation authorizing Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones permits cities to adopt an ordinance that encourages property owners with between one and three acres of vacant land to allow urban agriculture projects on their property for a minimum of five years in exchange for reduced property taxes.
Supporting this law is a win-win situation for us. We have no plans to develop the Taylor Street Farm lot in the near future, and Garden To Table’s operation provides locally grown produce to the community.
It’s important to understand that farms in these incentive zones will not be permanent. A developer will build on the land when the time is right. But in the meantime, the land can be used to build community relations and promote the local food economy. With thousands of acres of vacant land throughout San Jose, there is plenty of room to grow food and build residential and commercial buildings.
Last year San Jose made authorizing Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones a top priority for 2016, but now this ordinance is in danger of missing the critical deadline. Under the state law, projects have to be signed up before November for the tax incentive, so the ordinance must be completed at least one month sooner.
I urge the San Jose City Council to pass the ordinance as soon as possible, and I urge landowners and developers to consider this great opportunity to benefit themselves and the community.
Garden to Table, The Health Trust, La Mesa Verde and other great organizations are ready to help create community serving agriculture that encourages a local food economy and helps provide food security for local families with limited access to nutritious produce.
But first the San Jose City Council needs to act.
Case Swenson is president of Barry Swenson Builder based in San Jose. He wrote this for the Mercury News.
