Councilmember Kendra Brooks and garden groups applaud the Land Bank’s decision to move forward on acquiring vacant land for community gardens and affordable housing.
PHILADELPHIA – Since early 2022, Councilmember Kendra Brooks has worked closely with community gardeners to protect garden land that had once been slated for sheriff sale. Over several years, they sought to free vacant land from prior claims and secure the land for community use as gardens. In a special meeting on Saturday, the Land Bank completed a critical next step toward that goal, agreeing to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will allow garden plots to be acquired by the Land Bank and, ultimately, transferred to communities for future generations.
“Community gardeners have been waiting anxiously for years,” said Councilmember Kendra Brooks (At-Large). “These folks put in the work to clean up and care for vacant lots in their neighborhoods, all for the good of their communities. It would be a loss for our entire city to lose the beautiful green spaces that they created, and I’m very glad to see the Land Bank taking action to exercise the priority bid and get these gardens into the hands of the community.”
“The Holly Street Garden has been serving the community for almost twenty years, and it’s been almost ten years since we started the process of trying to protect our garden with Neighborhood Gardens Trust,” said Elizabeth Waring, Manager of the Holly Street Garden. “I’m so excited that we are one step closer to finally protecting our garden.”
In May 2022, Councilmember Brooks, along with community gardeners and advocates, launched a campaign to protect community land from being sold at sheriff sale. In 2023, with the help of former Council President Darrell Clark, she secured funding to purchase the liens on 91 parcels of land that had been sold to a private bank as a way to raise revenue for the city.
In 2024, she held a hearing on urban agriculture and introduced legislation in City Council to give the Land Bank a priority bid, allowing the City to purchase tax-delinquent properties to be put to use as affordable housing or preserved as garden land. But months after the bill became law, the Land Bank still had not used the priority bid to acquire any properties, leaving gardeners frustrated and unsure about the future of their community gardens.
Finally, on Saturday March 22, the Land Bank convened a special meeting to approve an MOU to allow the Land Bank to acquire properties using the priority bid. Garden parcels that are acquired by the Land Bank can be transferred to organizations like Neighborhoods Garden Trust, that support communities in maintaining the gardens. Other vacant lots can be developed into affordable housing through programs like Turn the Key.
##
