FWD #OS1 • 941 words
Food access and housing stability are tangled together — but most localities still treat them as separate problems.
Research and policy work doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Off the Shelf is a new FWD series where our staff share what’s on their nightstands — and why it keeps circling back to housing. This week, Maria shares her latest read:
📖 Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City by Kate Brown is available from W.W. Norton.
I picked up Tiny Gardens Everywhere expecting to read about gardening. I ended up thinking about zoning.
MIT environmental historian Kate Brown traces three centuries of urban gardening across London, Paris, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and beyond — and her argument isn’t really about plants. It’s about what people do when wages fall short, when systems fail, when the safety net has holes. They grow food. They share it. They build something that looks, from the outside, like a garden, but functions more like a neighborhood’s immune system.
That framing stuck with me, because it sounds a lot like affordable housing.
Land Is the Through-Line
Housing and food access don’t usually share a policy conversation in Virginia. They have different agencies, different funding streams, and different advocacy communities. But for a family paying more than half their income in rent, those aren’t separate problems. For a senior in a subsidized apartment without a car, a neighborhood without a grocery store is a housing and health issue. The stability of where you live and the security of what you eat are tangled together in ways that don’t respect jurisdictional lines.
In her book, Brown’s history makes that tangle visible. The connective thread, across every city and every era she covers, is land. Every use we ask of urban land — housing, commercial development, parks, parking, transit corridors — is a choice made at the expense of every other use. A community garden is no different. Neither is an affordable apartment. When land gets expensive, the uses with the weakest legal standing go first — and in most Virginia localities, a garden has no legal standing at all.
When neighborhoods get redeveloped, the informal food infrastructure disappears before residents do. The community plots, the corner stores, and backyard orchards go quietly. And because many of these assets operated without formal approvals, they can easily fade away without a zoning hearing or a community meeting.
In one example from the book, Brown traces how African American migrants from the South built communities around orchards and gardens in D.C. neighborhoods like Deanwood and Marshall Heights starting in the late 19th century. They were food infrastructure, mutual aid networks, and anchors of neighborhood identity — far more than just hobby plots.
Then, urban renewal came through and took the housing and the land together. Was that a coincidence? The Conversation has traced how redlining, racial covenants, and suburban supermarket flight combined to drain wealth and food access from the same neighborhoods at the same time — a pattern Brown’s history makes legible at street level.
Researchers are still working out how to name this phenomenon. As the University of Michigan points out, the term “food desert” itself is now contested. The conditions that create them aren’t natural, and the word may obscure more than it reveals about why fresh food is hard to find in some communities and not others.
Image: Lederer Gardens Greenhouse, Washington City Paper
What Does This Look Like in Virginia?
The data on food access in Virginia are still catching up to the problem — and researchers debate how to measure it. But even existing snapshots can be instructive.
A Virginia Food Desert Task Force report co-led by Virginia Tech and Virginia State University found poverty to be the strongest predictor of food deserts across the Commonwealth, with lack of transportation a close second. It also found Virginia’s rate of low food access exceeded the national rate at the time — concentrated not only in rural Southside and Southwest Virginia, but also in pockets of Richmond, Petersburg, Hampton, Roanoke, and even more affluent localities like Alexandria and Fairfax.
That geography maps closely onto where affordable housing is concentrated. The overlap isn’t surprising once you see it — but it raises a question worth sitting with: are the localities investing most in affordable housing production also investing in food access? Or are those conversations still happening in separate rooms?
In Richmond, organizations like Happily Natural Day have been doing exactly what Brown documents historically — transforming vacant lots into community gardens and urban farms, framing the work explicitly as economic development and self-determination for Black and Brown communities. Virginia Tech and Virginia State University have backed similar efforts across the state through urban agriculture mini-grants, treating gardens as infrastructure worth funding rather than amenities worth tolerating.
But it isn’t happening everywhere. This infrastructure needs a legal home, and that’s where zoning enters. Most Virginia localities still treat urban agriculture as an afterthought in their land-use codes — if they address it at all. A community garden on a vacant lot can stabilize a block, provide fresh produce in a food desert, and build the kind of social cohesion that makes neighborhoods resilient. It can also, depending on who owns the land and what the zoning allows, become something else entirely the moment a developer shows interest.
The Question Left over
Brown’s book isn’t a policy manual — it’s a history, and a genuinely surprising one. But the question it leaves behind for me is concrete: if a community garden can stabilize a block, build social cohesion, and fill a food gap, why are most Virginia localities still treating it as an afterthought in their land-use codes?Housing and food advocates are already working on overlapping problems, but they’re not always in the same rooms. That’s worth changing.
What are you seeing in your community at the intersection of housing stability and food access? Drop us a note — we’d love to hear from you.