ARTICLES
April 2006 ARTICLES
Contents © 2006
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
We Have to Throw Them Off
Developer Seeks to Destroy South Central Los Angeles Community Farm
BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER
The state, said V.I. Lenin, "is the organization of violence for the suppression of some class" for the sake of another. While not expressing the character of the state considered in its true nature (a natural institution to realize the common good of all), the old Bolshevik seems to have gotten it right when one considers how the state often operates. Take recent events in the city of Los Angeles as an example.
The past several months have seen the city of Los Angeles and a private developer pitted against some 350 urban farmers in the South Central area of the city. The developer, Ralph Horowitz of Libaw-Horowitz Investment Company, wants to use 14 acres he bought from the city at Alameda and East 41st Street for a warehouse; the problem is, however, that the property has been the site of successful urban garden for the past 13 years. The farmers have refused to abandon their plots while Horowitz has sought to evict them.
In the late 1980s, the city of Los Angeles, by eminent domain, bought the property at East 41st and Alameda from nine private owners, including the Alameda-Barbara Investment Company (in which Horowitz was a partner), which owned 80 percent of the property. The city planned to use the land, directly in the middle of a poor neighborhood, as the site for a trash incinerator; but when the surrounding community rose in protest, the city backed down. The city kept the land, turning it over to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. Following the riots in 1992, the food bank allowed residents of the area to use the site (temporarily say some accounts) as a community garden.
By all accounts, the garden has been a great success. According to the October 31, 2005 Los Angeles Times, the mostly Mexican and Central American immigrant farmers divided the acreage into plots, where they planted a variety of crops, including the "leafy, spinach-like papalo quelite, cactus, sugarcane, and peach trees." Other crops, said the November 7, 2005 Vision Magazine, include heirloom maize, beans, calabaza, guayaba, chipilin, and chilacaote. Said Dr. Devon G. Peña, a University of Washington at Seattle anthropology professor and the article's author, "I identified 35 species, each with a multitude of medicinal or nutritional uses. I currently estimate a range of 100-150 species across row crops, trees, shrubs, vines, cacti, and herbaceous plants." The plots are tended at night and on weekends by farmers, most of whom spend their days, said the Times, "as seamstresses, laborers, or restaurant workers, earning $12,000 to $20,000 a year." One of the farmers, Remedios Zapata, told the October 26, 2005 University of Southern California Daily Trojan that the 14 acres "was like a city dump" when she and others first started working it. "We worked hard and turned it into this," she said, pointing to the now verdant landscape.
The South Central Community Garden, as the urban farm is called, is said to be the largest urban farm in California as well as one of the largest in the United States. But besides producing food, the garden, it is said, has formed closer ties among those who labor in it. "I have observed," wrote Peña, "youth and the elderly tending and harvesting crops at South Central. I am always struck by the way these relationships represent the shared social life of the garden. Perhaps the most important crop cultivated here is conviviality? These loving acts transmit knowledge of plants and farming but also build an ethic of self-reliance. The farmers grow food and social capital: the intergenerational cooperation farming provides gives youth meaningful alternatives to gangs and drugs."
However, a March 14 LA Weekly story says that some 20 farmers have accused South Central Farmers leaders Tezozomoc and Rufina Juarez of using verbal abuse and intimidation to compel farmers to engage in public protest. Some farmers, said the story, were turned out of the garden for refusing to comply with leaders' demands. Tezozomoc told the New Times that he and Juarez were merely enforcing rules enacted by the farm's "general membership." Juarez and he had been elected in February 2004; and though, said Tezozomoc, there had been electoral challenges against them, most of the farmers voted to keep them in office. As for forcing anyone to engage in protests, "we're not forcing anybody to be there," he said. "We've empowered people to struggle."
The existence of the South Central Community Garden was threatened nearly from its inception. According to the web site of the South Central Farmers, the group representing the farmers, in 1995 Ralph Horowitz and the Libaw-Horowitz Investment Company, the successor to Alameda-Barbara, asked the city to sell it the entire 14-acre property, since the city did not end up using for the purpose it had intended. The city came up with a purchase agreement in which it said it would sell the site to Libaw-Horowitz for $5,227,200, to which the investment company agreed in 1996. However, the deal never went through because the city council never approved it. (The agreement, according to the South Central Farmers, specified council approval.) Horowitz's investment company in 2002 sued the city for not going through with the agreement.
The city and Horowitz settled the case the following year, the city agreeing to a sale price of $5,050,000. The city council in August 2003 discussed and agreed to the sale in closed session (thus allowing no public comment) and, on September 23 of that year, sent the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank a letter notifying it of the sale. The food bank, then, informed the farmers. On December 11, 2003, title to the property was transferred to Ralph Horowitz and the Horowitz Family Trust as well as other related investment companies. Ralph Horowitz soon after issued a notice saying that farmers had to vacate the community garden on February 29, 2004.
News of the sale of the community farm to Horowitz prompted the farmers to organize. They formed South Central Farmers Feeding Families and obtained free legal counsel. Thus organized, they obtained from the Los Angeles superior court a temporary injunction and restraining order against Horowitz that forestalled the eviction. The South Central Farmers argued that, according to the Los Angeles city charter, the city must undertake various procedures before it can sell public land it deems it no longer needs -- in order to preclude the sale of public land it genuinely does need. In selling the property to Horowitz, said the South Central Farmers, the city did not submit to the procedures and thus did not comply with the charter. The court of appeals, however, decided on June 30, 2005 that the city did not have to comply with the procedures because it had not determined that it no longer needed the property -- effectively saying the city is allowed to sell important or necessary public property. The South Central Farmers appealed to the state supreme court, which on October 19 refused to hear the case.
Left with no legal recourse, the farmers staged rallies and a Sunday vigil in October. Meanwhile, according to the Los Angeles Times, ninth district councilwoman Jan Perry, showing the requisite concern for her constituents, began looking for alternative sites for the garden. The city came up with two sites -- one that was less than an acre and a three-acre site near high voltage. The farmers rejected both as being too small and the second as being a health hazard.
Patrick Dunlevy, an attorney for the farmers, admitted to the Times in October that "there's no legal option at this point" for the farmers. "It would have to be some sort of willing concession on the part of Ralph Horowitz, who could decide that for the public good he will allow them to continue farming there." Horowitz, however, showed no such willingness. He complained that the farmers had been "stalling and stalling" "We have to throw them off," he said, according to the Times. "They're not going to walk off voluntarily. They have to be thrown off by a sheriff." Horowitz wanted to build his warehouse (which, rumor has it, will be a Wal-Mart facility.)
But the farmers kept "stalling," setting guards over the farm plots day and night, burning wood planks to keep warm. Tezozomoc, who took over his family's plot after his father was diagnosed with diabetes, told the Times that the farmers and Horowitz both suffered from the city's dealings, but the community's needs were more important that a developer's. "We are not starving for warehouses," he said. "But on the contrary there are families who live in this community who are starving."
Horowitz was not done. On February 23 of this year he filed a lawsuit in superior court against South Central Farmers Feeding. The lawsuit claims that the "defendants have used the injunction to usurp physical control of the Foodbank and Horowitz, including threats of violence and changing the locks." The lawsuit asks for $645,199.22 in injuries and $84,546.50 in attorneys' fees.
The final stroke against the farmers came, it seemed, on March 1, when the county sheriff's department placed an eviction notice on the west gate of the South Central Community Garden. The property had to be vacated by the end of the day on March 6, said the notice.
As they had been doing for weeks, the farmers came to the Los Angeles city council meeting on March 3. According to an indymedia.org report, the council heard six of the forty farmers and their supporters (20 of whom wanted to speak), and then council president Eric Garcetti cut off public comment. Leaving the council chambers, the farmers marched on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office. They said they wanted the mayor to explain his pledge to "green" Los Angeles and requested that he intercede for them in the eviction process. Villaraigosa did not appear, however; instead, Larry Frank, deputy mayor for neighborhood and community services, addressed the crowd.
Frank told the group that Villaraigosa was trying to negotiate an option to buy the land, which Horowitz said he would be willing to part with for $16.35 million -- over thrice what he paid for it two years earlier. The farmers, to date, had raised only $9 million, $6 million of which came from an anonymous source, much of the remainder from the Trust for Public Land. To the farmers' demand that the city exercise eminent domain over the land, Frank said that Horowitz was claiming that the fair market value of the property was worth $25 million, five times what he paid for it in 2003. In selling the property for $16 million, he was giving the city a deal, Frank said. Frank told the farmers that Horowitz was "using you guys as hostages" to soak the city. Frank suggested that the farmers formulate a "back-up" plan -- save "four or five acres" of their farm and accept smaller plots scattered about the city. "You can take this as a revolution for open space," he said, "and I can get the mayor to stand side by side with you." The crowd roundly rejected the offer.
As it turned out, the South Central Farmers had one more legal trick to pull. On March 3 and 6, tenants of the farm filed a claim to the right of possession of the land with the county sheriff's department. On March 6, the claim was submitted to the Los Angeles superior court, which scheduled a hearing for March 13, 2006. The eviction was thus delayed for at least another week.
But before the hearing occurred, the city on March 9 said it would help halt any evictions from the community garden while the city, the Trust for Public Land, and Horowitz negotiated over a possible sale of the property. If the negotiations succeed, the property would become a community trust. Yet the city's intervention did not halt the legal process of eviction, only delayed it.
For more information on South Central Farmers Feeding Families, see www.southcentralfarmers.com.