MSU’s Land Policy Institute has announced survey results on placemaking and the housing industry. With grant money from the National Association of REALTORS®, the LPI asked developers, bankers, and local officials about their perceptions of placemaking and its impact on the housing industry, and about the barriers that impede implementing placemaking projects.

Good news for placemaking advocates like the Center for 21st Century Communities (21c3), most developers and bankers “strongly agreed that supporting placemaking needs to be an important part of Michigan strategies to create high-impact economic activity attraction.” Local officials across the board are largely behind it. 95% of those surveyed think it is good for “economic development.”

However, over half of surveyed bankers think placemaking projects are at least somewhat financially risky. The survey identifies barriers and reveals that the case for championing placemaking strategies is not cut and dry.

It is complex, for example, according to the results placemaking has “the ability to increase home values. Yet, certain placemaking features...are bound to create housing affordability challenges for several sectors of the workforce,” the LPI states.

The full report is due out later this year.

Detroit has a considerable amount of publicly-owned vacant land - no big surprise. The big question; What to do with it? One option that is up for discussion is to use some of this land for urban agriculture. Proponents of urban farming and gardening contend that more locally grown produce will increase residents' access to food and utilize the land in a productive way. 

According to a report, “Growing Food in the City: The Production Potential of Detroit’s Vacant Land,” which the C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems at Michigan State University released this summer, the City of Detroit owned 31,123 parcels of vacant land amounting to 3,598 acres, by the end of 2008. Vacant land owned by the City of Detroit, Wayne County, the State of Michigan, and the Wayne County Land Bank totals 44,085 vacant parcels amounting to 4,848 acres.

One of the questions the report sought to answer was; “Is it really conceivable for urban farms and gardens to contribute to the urban food supply in any significant way?” This report concludes that the answer is yes.

It “presents a summary of research on the possibilities and desirability of food cultivation on the publicly-owned vacant land in Detroit,” the report states. Aside from presenting a “catalog of vacant land,” it examines “how season extension techniques and post-harvest management would impact this availability,” including things like hoop-houses, as well as the impact of “biointensive growing methods,” the “desirability” of urban farming based on public feedback from interviews and focus groups, and more. A particularly interesting piece of this research looks at “Local Production Capacity” in Detroit, which determines how much of the city’s “annual vegetable or fruit consumption...could be supplied through local production given season constraints,” in different production scenarios, the report reads.

Jennifer Eberbach is a professional journalist and writer. Find contact information on her website www.jenthewriter.info

Michigan State University Museum is hosting the Great Lakes Folk Festival this weekend, August 13 - 15, in downtown East Lansing. Museum director Gary Morgan talked with News Talk 760 WJR’s Kirk Heinze about this year’s “Grassroots Green” theme, which seeks to encourage environmental consciousness and celebrate the long “heritage” of green practices. According to its website, “The festival encourages cross-cultural understanding of our diverse society through the presentation of musicians, dancers, cooks, storytellers and craftspeople whose traditions are rooted in their communities.” On top of 55 performances (from blues to hawaiian ukelele), the festival will include things like art made from recycled materials, green activities for kids, sustainable food, and the accompanying Bookfest will focus on sustainability.

Gary Morgan makes a good point that green practices and the idea of environmental sustainability aren't anything new. “As we go forward as a community and as the world explores how it will achieve that sustainable future, some of the deliverables will be with cutting edge technology, new discoveries every day....but we mustn’t forget that notions of greening and sustainability go back a long, long way. A lot of the traditional practices and a lot of the folk traditions of Michigan, and more broadly, are all about that relationship with place and that relationship with an environment. What “Grassroots Green” will be doing is providing every visitor with an opportunity to just think about that. Look at some of the traditions in music and story telling, in art, and so forth, which all have had strong influence from the notion of people’s relationship with a sustainable environment,” Morgan told Kirk Heinze.

Jennifer Eberbach is a professional journalist and writer. Find contact information on her website www.jenthewriter.info

Michigan State University professors, students, volunteers from AmeriCorps, and Lansing residents are rolling up their sleeves and doing some urban farming on South Hayford Street, which is located in one of Lansing’s “food deserts.” MSU academic specialist/visiting assistant professor Laura DeLind and professor emeritus of teacher education Linda Anderson started the urban farm in order to teach residents how to grow produce and increase the neighborhood’s access to healthy food, as reported by MSU.

Anderson explains that a “food desert” is “primarily in a neighborhood where people have limited incomes, there’s no easy access to places to buy healthy food like fresh fruits and vegetables, unless you have transportation and many low income families don’t have easy transportation. Therefore their sources of food are often fast food restaurants, liquor stores, corner grocery stores--not a lot of fresh produce,” as reported by MLIVE.

DeLind and Anderson talked about Urbandale Farm with 760 WJR’s Kirk Heinze on his radio show "Greening of the Great Lakes." The interview will air this Friday, June 11 at 7 pm and it is already posted online. 

Jennifer Eberbach is a professional journalist and writer. Find contact information on her website www.jenthewriter.info