The Community Garden That’s Bringing a Forgotten Neighborhood Back from the Brink

In Liberty City, a predominantly black neighborhood northwest of Miami’s central business district that’s been devastated by a century of misguided urban policies, is a patch of green. It’s almost something out of a storybook, this community garden: A group of hardwood trees (known to ecologists as a hammock) where the branches are weighed down with plump tropical fruits and swarms of butterflies dance about.
It’s all the more surreal given the contrast with the landscape surrounding. When NationSwell spoke with Roger Horne, director of community health relations for Urban Greenworks, in early June, a 10-year-old boy had just been shot six blocks away at the Liberty Square Community Center, a popular local hangout where kids play basketball. The boy survived, but the bullet remains lodged in his left calf, and he needs a walker to move. “I thank God he ain’t dead, that God gave him a chance … again, you know, a second chance in life,” his mother tells the Miami Herald.
Urban Greenworks isn’t waiting around for second chances. Using the simple act of gardening, the Miami nonprofit is bettering this down-and-out community. As we detailed in the first part of this series, the group fosters as much life in its gardeners — at-risk teens from low-income neighborhoods, youth remanded from drug court to rehab and prisoners in the municipal jails — as in the flora it’s tending. But the plants’ actual fruit is equally important to Urban Greenworks’s mission. In Liberty City, Horne and his colleague James Jiler are promoting access to fresh and healthy produce in a “food desert,” by growing vegetation in neglected lots and tending to an urban forest — all while giving jobs to the neighborhood’s underserved population.
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Educated at Cornell University and Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical school, Horne, just like Jiler, came to Miami from New York City (Brooklyn, to be exact). Since he’s been in the palm-tree city, Horne served as community liaison or board member for any and all groups working to help Liberty City’s youth: the Miami Mayor’s Youth Council, the public school’s student advisory board, the city’s urban forestry committee, the Urban Environmental League of Greater Miami, the Consortium for a Healthier Miami-Dade and and the Circle of Brotherhood, a black male empowerment group. While all that’s major resume fodder, Horne’s not out to pad his credentials or garner publicity. (In fact, it took NationSwell days of attempts before Horne found a free minute to talk.) He does the work because he cares about the neighborhood kids and their future.
Horne’s also an inventor of sorts. He likes testing out new models, molding them until they’re bearing fruit (so to speak), then sharing what he’s learned. “One of the things that we always tell the kids that we work with is, ‘You have to adapt. If something doesn’t work this year, don’t be afraid to change it next time,’” Horne says.
Two of his signature initiatives include setting up a farmers market that’s actually affordable to residents — all $1 for each bundle, not the inflated prices that Whole Foods and other corporations have conflated with the term “organic” — and Hammocks in Da Hood, a program to restore native trees in underutilized lots. His latest idea, still in the works, involves urban aquaculture and mariculture, raising tilapia in two 1,600-gallon aquaponic tanks at a local high school.
“Folks often talk about feeding the community, but they think there’s only one way to feed them,” Horne says, which is why Urban Greenworks is training people to breed and raise fish. “If you have enough of the community doing it, you can feed more people and create an income source from selling large tilapia online if you grow it in volume.”
Liberty City has one of the largest concentration of African-Americans in South Florida. As with other formerly-segregated cities like Baltimore, it’s a section of Miami that began as an enclave of black culture, the “Harlem of the South.” Because middle-class African-Americans shared Miami’s northwest quarter with low-income minorities, a plethora of well-regarded institutions — from nightclubs to churches — popped up alongside shacks that provided poor living conditions to impoverished blacks. First known as Colored Town and later renamed Overtown, the teeming neighborhood once composed as much as 40 percent of Miami’s population.
The area got its start as federally designated overflow for Overtown, when white business leaders wanted to expand downtown’s footprint. In 1937, Liberty Square, a New Deal-funded public housing project, opened five miles farther north of downtown. “It’s a pretty hardscrabble street. The project is a series of one-story long rowhouses, all attached and set in squares,” Jiler describes. Redlining and racism kept black residents stuck in the quarter, eventually leading to Miami being the most segregated of the largest metropolises in 1940, 1950 and again in 1960. By the time an expressway sundered Overtown, displacing nearly 20,000 residents, the neighborhood had long fallen into physical disarray. Not surprisingly, it’s where riots broke out in 1980 when three policemen were acquitted (by an all-white jury) in the death of Arthur McDuffie, a prominent African-American businessman.
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Today, ask some local government officials to point out Liberty City on a map of Miami, and it’s likely that they’ll scratch their heads. And don’t expect to find it on any official map of Miami, either. City bureaucrats still refer to it as Model City, after its signature housing projects. Only the residents call their home Liberty City; they’re some of the only ones that identify it as a place of possibility and freedom.
Sadly, the others who foresee a vibrant future for the neighborhood are those who could change it irrevocably. In land grabs, developers could clear out blocks of residents to make room for swanky, amenity-stocked condominiums. Miami’s growing rapidly, and this historically black community will likely see new demographics. “Liberty City is five minutes from downtown, five minutes from the arena where the Miami Heat play, five minutes from the port, the largest port on the East Coast,” Jiler explains. “There’s new businesses, people are buying into it. It’s a neighborhood in transition.”
In the meantime, Horne believes the gardens are rebuilding the rooted tendrils that hold the troubled neighborhood together. Last spring, he expanded Cerasee Farms, the group’s ground zero for urban farming, across the street to another blighted lot. By October, nearly 100 seventh-graders constructed 20 planting beds with cinderblocks, doubling the farm’s production.
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The farmers’ market has more sellers than ever before, and it’s finally gained the permits required by the city. (Municipal funding, however, is a different story.) “When Roger and I first had a farmers’ market in Liberty City, the city [of Miami] came and closed us down. There was no permitting, and there was no process for this kind of open-air market anyway. There was no zoning for music, drumming, food being sold, and different vendors and kids,” Jiler says. “Three blocks away, we saw helicopters flying. Two cops had been shot and killed. Meanwhile, they’re shutting us down while we’re doing something positive for the community.”
Horne has since worked extensively to change the city’s ordinances so these kind of open markets can be held on a regular basis. The latest idea from Horne involves the market lowering its prices by subsidizing other farmers’ produce with money from subscription buyers (CSAs) outside of the neighborhood and actual crops harvested on Urban Greenworks plots, like tomatoes, corn, okra, four kinds of kale, two kinds of cabbage, spinach and broccoli.
“Most of the stuff people are buying at WalMart or Winn-Dixie… is colorless. White, brown, orange — never really anything green. Our plates aren’t colorful, and the nutrients come from the colors on your plate,” Horne says. “The idea is to show folks how food tastes when you grow it. We show it’s not hard to buy organic. We try to make it affordable for them so they’re not afraid to try [cooking] it and mess up.”
The Hammocks In Da Hood program, too, is offering Liberty City residents the same amenities you’d find in Miami’s wealthier areas. “When you look at global warming and the disparity in wealth between communities, it’s usually the canopy that matters. The wealthy neighborhoods in Miami like Coral Gables have one. In Liberty City, there’s no canopy, no shade, no trees,” Jiler says. “Our idea is to raise the canopy in Miami with edible fruit trees and native trees. The hammocks have largely been destroyed in Miami for redevelopment and replaced by inexotic, institutional and industrial land. We’re carving out our niche and recreating a native landscape for the marginalized in society.”
Starting young, Urban Greenworks is teaching Liberty City’s youth sustainability and self-reliance, while also rejuvenating the century-old projects. With greenery returned to its public spaces, the land is finally living up to its name: a free city and a model one.
“The people of Liberty City have been starting to fight for their rights. [Gentrification] is coming, and they see it coming. They see the developers and the vision for Miami. Some of it will be lost, the community is starting to be taken away. I’m very optimistic the community will keep some of the current things going,” Horne says. “Regardless of all the violence that happens on a daily basis, we’re still a neighborhood and we’re still a community. I hope it doesn’t lose that.”
READ MORE: What Kale and Arugula Have to Do with Reducing Recidivism
SEE MORE: 15 Photographs that Reveal the Beauty of an Inner City Garden

15 Photographs that Reveal the Beauty of an Inner City Garden

Passion fruit vines cling to a chainlink fence surrounding a lush oasis of fruit trees, vegetable planters and palms in the midst of inner-city Miami. The garden, Cerasee Farm, is a project of Urban Greenworks, a Miami-based nonprofit using agriculture to bring opportunity and healthy food to underprivileged communities. Named for a medicinal Caribbean vine that sprouts wherever land is disturbed, Cerasee is just one of many projects started by the organization since it was founded in 2010.
Read more about Urban Greenworks here and here.
Photos by Ryan Stone for NationSwell.
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What Kale and Arugula Have to Do with Reducing Recidivism

It’s mango season in Miami, and James Jiler’s kitchen counter keeps filling with bags and bags of the tropical fruit. The towering mound accumulates nearly faster than he can slice the mangos apart or blend them together in a summer daiquiri.
Tasty as the fresh fruit is already, it’s even sweeter to Jiler because of where it comes from: many of the mangoes were nurtured and picked by at-risk youth, halfway house residents and the formerly incarcerated. As the executive director of Urban Greenworks, Jiler provides green jobs and environmental programs like planting in urban spaces or science education in schools to troubled residents of Miami. Since the organization’s start in 2010, roughly 55 people have been employed by the nonprofit, plus hundreds more have served as volunteers.
“Every time we plant a cluster of native trees, we create a little, cool sanctuary, or a butterfly garden or a natural habitat for the endangered Dade pine that was once there 150 years ago,” Jiler says. “My philosophy is to change one person, one garden, one community at a time.”
Before he arrived on the southeast tip of Florida, Jiler lived in New York’s East Village for more than a decade. He spent his time organizing with his neighbors to protect several community gardens — precious land in dense Lower Manhattan — from the dual threats of gentrification and former mayor Rudy Giuliani. He spent his days heading up the GreenHouse Program, a “jail to street” program at Rikers Island, the city’s central corrections facility, where he taught male and female prisoners “the art of gardening” on two acres of land adjacent to the penitentiary. Schooled in the methods of tending plants from seed to blossom, the formerly incarcerated left “immediately employable,” Jiler says. They could quickly transition to jobs in the city’s parks department or nature conservancies. Some alums even found themselves potting flowerbeds at spacious penthouse terraces, overlooking skyscrapers and the great emerald of Central Park.
“I would say, of close to 700 inmates I worked with over 10 years, I could count on my hands the ones that had a college education and on my hands and feet the ones that graduated high school. The rank and file of incarcerated in our cities are undereducated, underemployed and generally poor,” explains Jiler, who completed a graduate program at Yale University’s School of Forestry. “Using horticulture and gardening and food production, we’d redirect their lives. It’s a way to develop vocational skills and educate. When the real difficulties begin, it’s a way to reduce recidivism.”
Not only did gardening provide the incarcerated with work, its rhythms and routines could soothe tensions and relieve anxiety by troweling the earth. “It’s horticulture as therapy,” Jiler explains. “People’s lives could be transformed having these positive interactions with nature.” If a convict needed to confront the old buddies that once got him into trouble, for example, the rote actions of pruning could be meditative, could prove that small and painful incisions do eventually beautify the whole.
“I like to see beauty. What gets me going is to see a garden made by people in that community who have been marginalized, who are considered unemployable, involved in something productive and meaningful,” Jiler says.
In 2008, Jiler packed up from his New York neighborhood, feeling it had lost its edge, and journeyed south to Miami. He thought his work in the penal system had been effective, but he started to wonder if it was possible to bust what he calls the “cradle-to-prison pipeline” at an earlier stage. In Liberty City, “one of the most neglected inner-city neighborhoods in Miami,” Jiler found the Belafonte TACOLCY Center, a community youth center, and a partner with whom to launch a green initiative. Roger Horne, a naturalist who’d co-founded Youth Bike, a program teaching mechanical skills and safety to inner-city kids, and taught gardening at the center, now heads Urban Greenworks’s community health relations.
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At their newly formed organization, Jiler and Horne created Cerasee Farm. It’s named for a tropical vine in the Caribbean that sprouts wherever the land is disturbed and produces seed pods used in medicinal teas — just the antidote the pair believed Liberty City needed. Over the course of a year, the nonprofit’s employees and volunteers transformed an abandoned tract of land into a huge urban farm. They grow moringas, a tree that sprouts healthy superfood, and mulberries, a tree that shoots up quickly and produces fruit within eight months. Higher up in the canopy, there’s avocados and lychees.
In August 2013, Jiler also established the Mustard Seed Project, creating an urban farm of kale, arugula and cranberry hibiscus at the halfway home Agape House, where women reside post-incarceration. Almost all have a history of substance abuse, and a number have suffered as victims of human trafficking. Women from the facility also run the Edible Wall, 400 square feet of fresh herbs and fruits, like peppermint and spearmint, cilantro, basil, passion fruit and strawberries, that supply downtown’s trendy mixologists and chefs.
“I look forward to each day so much: we get to be outside with nature and get our hands dirty,” one woman says of the program. “I used to hate going outside, but now I love to with all the plants and flowers — so much life.” Another adds, “It’s great to be part of something beautiful for a change.”
It’s said that weeds are nothing more than unloved flowers — a lesson that holds true for gardeners, too. No matter if they’re wild, bent or misshapen, Jiler accepts Liberty City’s inmates, addicts and youth — the people that others would uproot and toss aside. Some may not look rosy today, but with a little care, they’ll be like late-spring blossoms, all the more beautiful for the wait.
READ MORE: The Community Garden That’s Bringing a Forgotten Neighborhood Back from the Brink
SEE MORE: 15 Photographs that Reveal the Beauty of an Inner City Garden
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