Posted on 11/08/2018 8:57:35 AM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
In a first for the Bay Area, developers hoping to break ground on a new housing complex next year are wooing potential residents by offering a quirky but increasingly popular perk. It’s not a golf course, health club or even a pet spa — the big draw will be a farm, and access to all the tomatoes, zucchini and kale you can eat.
The “Agrihood” development plan heading to the Santa Clara City Council for a vote as early as next month calls for 361 homes and a small farm to be built on vacant land across the street from Westfield Valley Fair and down the road from Santana Row
The Santa Clara project takes its name from the agrihood movement, where developers build residential communities around urban farms. McMahon is tracking about 100 such projects across the country, and he’s constantly finding new additions.
The communities have become a hit with millennials who value locally grown food and healthy living. And in some regards, they can be easier to build than traditional housing developments. Adding a picturesque farm to a proposed project can help win over city officials and neighbors who otherwise may be reluctant to approve new construction, he said. Without a farm or other community benefit to sweeten the deal, development projects often get bogged down in opposition over fears that they will make congestion worse or ruin a neighborhood’s aesthetic.
The Santa Clara proposal calls for 36 townhomes and 325 apartments, including 181 apartments priced below market rates. Of those, 165 units would be for seniors making between $28,000 and $75,000 a year, which the city first began planning for more than a decade ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Novice farmers lease plots of farm land from the center at a discount, cultivate the land, sell their produce to local businesses and at farmer’s markets, and keep the profits. The farmers also sell their fruit and vegetables once a week on The Cannery property, providing residents with easy access to everything from peppers to melons to leafy greens."
My wife and I stayed at a really nice B&B in Midway, Utah several years ago called "The Johnson Mill" (since converted back to a home, unfortunately). It was adjacent to some large farm fields. A couple weeks before we arrived for our stay, the farmer applied ripe manure to his next door fields the Friday before a wedding was scheduled at the inn. I imagine the bride and groom will have some fun wedding stories to tell their kids and grandkids.
It sounds so romantic having beautiful farm fields next door to your house, but city slickers don't know that farms are stinky, dusty, and noisy places. Maybe these will be hobby farms with an organic farmer in coveralls manually picking caterpillars off the produce one by one and carefully pulling out each weed by hand.
An inspirationa idea for san francisco — crap in your living room!
Nice idea. However, for 361 units, the farm land looks too small to
support 361 families.
“Well, Charles, it’s your turn to weed the lower 40 this weekend.”
“Uh, sorry, not gonna be able to do that. The wife and I were hitting the slopes in Vail this weekend.”
I’ve thought about this for years: a planned community/subdivision (sans HOA) with each lot having enough cleared space (including for sun) for a family garden and a back yard/pool area.
San Jose/Santa Clara/Silly-Con Valley, Californication....
San Jose calls itself the “capitol of Silly-Con Valley”
but it used to be known as “the Garden City” and it was a huge producer of oranges, bing cherries, and other kinds of produce
not every change is necessarily for the better
“Nice idea. However, for 361 units, the farm land looks too small to support 361 families.”
They’re Indians, you could support 500 Indian families on that amount of land.
At best, you might have enough gardening space for two families or one farmer. I don’t think the guy in charge of this project has ever grown anything in his life. Course, if this were all Marijuana, then I think the project would work well.
You’re right. My mother-in-law lives next to a farm. When we go visit my car is filthy within a day from the dust that blows in from the fields.
Somehow I don’t think the food is “free”. These farms tend to charge the same prices as a supermarket. I’ve never found any bargins.
Cool! Put in a hog farm on one side and a dairy on the other.
On a bus in Mitaka Japan I saw a farm field with 3 story condos in the background next to factories. Limited space. Expensive too.
Course, if this were all Marijuana, then I think the project would work well.
Even if the farmers don't after the first harvest.
Good Neighbors the series comes to mind.
Yeah, but the produce isn’t for exclusive use of the tenants. It will be sold through other channels. The artists rendering shows what appears to be a large community garden plot, not a true farm.
The one mentioned in Davis, CA is 3.5-acres and can produce up to 25,000 pounds of produce an acre in peak season. It has 60 apartments. Assuming 2.5 people per apartment, that’s about 700 pounds of food per year per resident!
The farm in question will be stripped bare in no time (probably at night) - if not by the hundreds of residents, then by animals.
After the first crop, the place will go mainly to weed, but half-hearted efforts by a handful of residents could get in a second season crop, and yes, some hippy snowflakes will be out there pulling various insects off the plants and hand pulling weeds until they get dirty, get bitten, break a nail or all three on the same day - suddenly there will be other things to do like go to Wholefoods ....
The Olson family cherry stand in Sunnyvale is shutting down. They used to have big cherry orchards right along El Camino. One of the last orchards in the area just got torn out in Los Gatos.
In the Soviet Union this would have been called a collective.
The peaches in northeast Washington state are sold in local farmers markets in NE WA and North Idaho. In late August, they are at perfection ripeness! You cannot get a peach perfectly tree ripened in any supermarket.
I used to have a nice apricot next to the street. Every summer I would wake one morning to find it stripped bare by nighttime thieves. I finally tore it out.
The pilgrims tried it because it sounded good.....until the lazy ones decided others could do the work, and they, the lazys, could reap rewards they din’t work for.
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