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Picture the bucolic little town of a fairy tale. At its core stand medieval buildings, a square where folks hawk their goods, and perhaps a well to provide water. Beyond the defensive wall radiate agricultural fields, where people toil to bring grains, fruits, and vegetables to market.
Invert that for modern times and you’ve got the idea behind “agrihoods,” communities designed around a central farm.
Like a garden in a big city, agrihoods promise to boost food security, reduce temperatures, capture rainwater, and increase biodiversity. As climate change intensifies heat, flooding, and pressure on food systems, agrihoods could be a way to make urban living more resilient — not just more picturesque.
“Developers have a hard time offering open space, because they would like to build more housing,” said Vincent Mudd, a partner at the architectural firm Steinberg Hart, which designs agrihoods. “One of the few ways to kind of bridge that gap is to be able to use active open space that actually generates commerce.”
On paper, an agrihood is a simple concept: a working farm surrounded by single- or multifamily housing.
Steinberg Hart recently finished two of them in California — one in Santa Clara and another, called Fox Point Farms, in Encinitas. The former, south of San Francisco, features townhouses, market-rate units, and affordable housing, plus a community center and retail shops. The latter, north of San Diego, adds a farm-to-table restaurant, an event venue, and a grocery store, but its housing is primarily for sale instead of rent.
“Two different housing programs for two different communities, but built around the sustainability of urban farming,” Mudd said.
While these projects are in relatively affluent areas, Mudd said agrihoods can be built nearly anywhere — though it might require tweaks to zoning rules.
“Almost every city has the ability to make that zoning change,” Mudd said, “because it retains commerce, preserves jobs, generates sales tax income from retail, and provides mixed-income, attainable housing.”
(Last year, residents of the agrihood development in Santa Clara alleged that management failures have left them living in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, with delayed repairs, poor air quality, and other issues. The building’s manager, the John Stewart Co., and owner, Core Affordable, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Where it gets more complicated is the logistics of the farm. Water is the big one: Ideally a farm captures enough rainwater to keep crops hydrated. Because Northern California enjoys a Mediterranean climate of rainy winters and warm, dry summers, the Santa Clara agrihood gathers precipitation and stores it in a tower.
“It auto-refills with city water once it gets to a certain point, but we can get two-thirds, or sometimes all the way through the summer without having to do that,” said Lara Hermanson, co-founder of Farmscape, which helped design, install, and maintain the community’s farm.
A rainwater-capture system, though, comes with an upfront cost that a community garden in a lower-income neighborhood might not be able to afford. If one year the rains stop and drought takes hold, it will have to pay for more water.
“Perhaps people with the biggest need for food or nutrition security are also sort of disproportionately facing greater water expenses,” said Lucy Diekmann, an urban agriculture and food systems advisor at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Even so, one of the many charms of any urban farm or garden is that greenery, and even bare dirt, breaks up the concrete landscape. Historically, cities have been designed to whisk water through gutters and sewers as quickly as possible before it can pool and cause flooding. This strategy struggles to keep up as climate change supercharges rainstorms, making them dump more water. Green spaces let all that liquid soak into the ground, mitigating flooding even without deliberate catchment systems.
Still, an agrihood’s farm isn’t going to run itself. From the very beginning of planning, Hermanson said, a community must decide what it’s going to grow. The general idea is to get as much yield as possible because space is constrained compared to an industrial farm. So pumpkins probably aren’t a great idea, because those plants take up so much room.
Instead, in Santa Clara, Hermanson grows Persian cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and hot peppers because they’re small.
While an agrihood can’t feasibly provide all the calories residents need, it’s an especially powerful system because the produce that it does produce is highly nutritious.
Scale that food production up across a city, and the impact could be huge: One study found that Los Angeles could meet a third of its need for vegetables by converting vacant lots into gardens.
“It’s incredible what we could do with what we have, and what we could do even more with intentional planning,” said Catherine Brinkley, a social scientist who studies urban agriculture at the University of California, Davis.
Header Image by Greta Hoffman via Pexels
