About 6,000 square feet of space on St. Claude Court in the Lower 9th Ward, once one of the thousands of vacant lots across the city, now cultivates vegetables and herbs for Rashida Ferdinand’s organization Sankofa Community Development Corp.
On land leased from the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, students learn how to garden, produce is harvested and sold at community markets and neighbors have a section to pick vegetables for their own families to eat.
“It creates a model and a space of possibility,” Ferdinand said Friday, as city leaders and developers gathered in her garden.
The model is one that NORA hopes will be taken up, copied and reimagined by individuals and organizations citywide, as the agency tackles what to do with the 2,5000 remaining vacant lots on its books — beyond just cutting the grass.
Since Hurricane Katrina, NORA has sold 3,000 lots. But much of the city’s vacant land has been left unwanted by developers and have failed to sell at auction.
On Friday, NORA officials pushed a newly branded “NORA Green” initiative with four programs designed to get vacant lots back into use, at least temporarily, while waiting for neighborhood real estate demand to strengthen.
NORA Executive Director Jeffrey Hebert said his agency studied other cities — such as Chicago and Boston — for how to get vacant land back into productive use.
“What can you do in the interim until the market comes back?” Hebert asked.
A program called “Growing Green” offers leases of vacant lots for $250 per year for projects that focus on planting, gardening and urban agriculture. It will be a more broadly implemented version of NORA’s previous alternative land use project, Hebert said.
In addition to the annual $250 lease, applicants to the program must buy liability insurance for at least $1 million per incident and $2 million in aggregate, which costs an estimated $400 per year. To apply, visit NORA’s website.
Earlier this week, NORA launched an entrepreneurship contest looking for ideas on what to do with vacant commercial and light industrial lots for a chance at $7,500 in seed money from Entergy.
Other NORA Green programs include:
- Green infrastructure projects that use planting and other natural ways of managing water.
- Alternative land management in partnership with Louisiana State University’s urban landscape lab to research sustainable beautification of vacant lots.
- As an extension of the Lot Next Door program, offering discounts on lot-buyers who plan to invest in landscaping improvements such as flower beds, patios or fencing.
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