Wanna farm?

This guy (thumbs this way) has an idea for you.

Vision:

a one-hundred-and-forty-square-mile agricultural community with four major league sports teams, two good universities, the fifth largest art museum in the country, a world-class hospital, and headquarters of a now-global industry...a perfect place to redefine urban economics, moving away from the totally paved, heavy-industrial factory-town model to a resilient, holistic, economically diverse, self-sufficient, intensely green, rural/urban community—and in doing so become the first modern American city where agriculture, while perhaps not the largest, is the most vital industry.

A proposed master plan that would move the few people residing in lonely, besotted neighborhoods ... and turn the rest of the city into open farmland... residents could fit comfortably in fifty square miles of land. Much of the remaining ninety square miles could be farmed. Were that to happen, and a substantial investment was made in greenhouses, vertical farms, and aquaponic systems, ... producing protein and fibre 365 days a year and soon become the first and only city in the world to produce close to 100 percent of its food supply within its city limits. No semis hauling groceries, no out-of-town truck farmers, no food dealers. And no chain stores need move back. Everything eaten in the city could be grown in the city and distributed to locally owned and operated stores and co-ops.

chard and tomatoes on vacant lots, orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie

Reality:

Theres many amazing facts going on here for a city of nearly one million in a metro area of over 6 million:

--Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are chronic, and life expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.
-Zero produce-carrying grocery chains
-More than half of its residents must travel at least twice as far to reach the nearest grocery store as they do to a fast-food restaurant or convenience store
-Pheasants abundant in the city (I can attest to this first hand.)
-Raccoons occasionally harvested for dinner.
-over 103,000 vacant lots (check out a google maps aerial)
-forty square miles of unoccupied open land

The optimistic and downright shocking claims:

-A market exists "Five days a week, the Peaches & Greens truck winds its way through the streets as a loudspeaker plays R&B and puts out the call: ''Nutritious, delicious. Brought right to you. We have green and red tomatoes, white and sweet potatoes. We have greens, corn on the cob and cabbage, too.''"
-between 10 and 15 percent of its food supply inside city limits—more than most American cities
-the most agriculturally promising of the fourteen cities in five countries where Urban Farming now exists
-urban farming creates jobs. Even without local production, the food industry creates three dollars of job growth for every dollar spent on food


Vision Into Reality?

Changes to zoning and city law are a prerequisite. The community organization and will of the people is obvious. One great idea I heard is to double the value of food stamps when spent on local agriculture. Not only would you help the local economy via the multiplier mentioned above ($ stimulus! $) but you'd combat the health problems of poor citizens (though Lays would take a big hit.)