Katherine Li
Prickly pear fruits at The California Native Garden Foundation's regenerative garden in San Jose, California.
Against a backdrop of million-dollar condos and high-end malls, a low-income senior community called the Agrihood Sustainability Community broke ground on September 15 in downtown Santa Clara, California. When finished, the site will provide nearly 200 units of below-market-rate housing with more than 1.5 acres of regenerative farmland and additional open space for the benefit of veterans and seniors.
“This is how we are going to transform cities,” says Alrie Middlebrook, founder of the California Native Garden Foundation, which designed the project in partnership with The CORE Companies, a San Jose-based corporation that specializes in affordable senior housing.
“To really help senior residents is to put self-sufficiency and healthy choices back into their hands and to choose to reclaim our connection to nature.”
According to the Census Bureau, at least 70 percent of senior households in the city of Santa Clara are considered low income, with half of this group falling into the extremely low category. Meanwhile, the Santa Clara County population above the age of sixty is projected to increase by more than 200 percent over the next forty years, reflecting a nationwide trend. By 2034, the United States will be home to more adults over sixty-five than children under eighteen.
During Agrihood’s groundbreaking ceremony, California Senator Bob Wieckowski stood alongside other elected officials. He expressed pride in his role in assisting the project, which he called “an impactful collaboration for good between the private sector, the community, and city and state government.”
Miguel A. Altieri, an agroecology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says there is a tradition of urban agricultural programs serving low-income communities in other states, despite ecological horticulture skills often being a challenging feat for urban farmers: “It’s all about maximizing the efficiency of biological processes without chemical inputs.”
Katherine Li
Alrie Middlebrook, the founder of CNGF.
Altieri has studied regenerative gardening programs in Camden, New Jersey, a city with a high poverty rate, where community gardeners have harvested enough food during the growing season to feed more than 500 people three servings a day. Similarly, in the low-income neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn, New York, the Added Value Farm, which occupies more than 2.5 acres of land, supplies around 18,000 kilograms of fruit and vegetables to the community each year.
A study of Detroit’s communal and commercial farming community conducted by the Institute on the Environment also found that these farms have produced enough crops to feed more than 600 people from their more than 1,300 community, market, family, and school gardens.
Even though such initiatives are distinct from Agrihood, their success sustains Alrie Middlebrook’s belief that projects like Agrihood can succeed.
“We could actually meet most of our lifecycle needs if we change how we are using land in cities,” Middlebrook says.
To Middlebrook, the development also honors the land’s history. Before World War II, the area in what is now downtown Santa Clara was known as the Valley of the Heart’s Delight. It was once one of the most prolific agricultural production areas in the world, where farmers grew apples and French prunes.
Today, farming on the site will begin from a very different starting point: breaking through concrete of what was the former home of the University of California’s Bay Area Research and Extension Center.
Middlebrook says the project will also focus on growing Indigenous plants and crops such as elderberry trees, white sage, and Malabar spinach. Additionally, it will draw on twenty-first century technology to ensure high yields, through a partnership with students from the San Jose Evergreen Community College District. Alongside established scientists, they will measure the organic contents in the soil and the amount of carbon plants in the garden sequester, as well as devise nutritional plans to support the senior members.
Katherine Li
Sunchokes at CNGF in San Jose, California.
“This project will be backed up not only by vision and ideology, but also by scientific data and detailed land management,” says Middlebrook, who explains that the designs, with a strong focus on local edible plants and arranging crops into hedgerows that mimic the riparian habitat of California’s rivers, are meant to maximize plant health and production.
Her ultimate goal is to establish twenty-five of such housing communities for underserved populations. She believes that if one Agrihood project can be done, then similar models can adapt to the needs of different cities across the nation.
Therese Lichtle, who leads the Mindful Aging program, a collaborative initiative between Family Alliance for Counseling and Resolution Tools and the African Community Health Institute, says this holistic approach to senior wellness is key to a high quality of life.
Katherine Li
An aquaponic system CNGF built in its small regenerative garden in San Jose, California.
“We should move past the point where we just diagnose an illness and send the patients home with prescriptions,” Lichtle says. “So much of our bodily discomfort is also associated with food and nutrition and stress level.”
In her previous role selling medical equipment to aid patient recovery, Lichtle started to ponder why patients ended up in such conditions in the first place. That led her to leave her original occupation to pursue a degree at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and become an expert on how to utilize a combination of Chinese and Western medicine and organic food as a pathway toward better health.
“To really help senior residents is to put self-sufficiency and healthy choices back into their hands and to choose to reclaim our connection to nature,” she says. “That is how we can best survive as a species.”
This article was updated to reflect that the Mindful Aging program is not a project of Agrihood’s but a collaborative initiative between Family Alliance for Counseling and Resolution Tools and African Community Health Institute.