In 1977 the Boston Urban Gardens was formed through a coalition of black community organizers, white activists, and other Boston residents to better coordinate gardening efforts in the city . In Oakland, the Black Panther Party grew gardens for subsistence on open spaces and on the properties of facilities used for BPP activities . Nationally, community garden received significant support and became increasingly institutionalized by the end of the 1970s. Between 1976 and 1993 the USDA ran an Urban Agriculture Program in 26 cities providing technical and financial support to gardeners. In 1982, $17 million worth of food was produced by community gardeners supported by the Urban Agriculture Program . In 1979 the American Community Gardening Association was formed at a conference of community gardeners from across the nation. Their early mission included publicizing the work of gardens, providing mechanisms for information exchange and establishing deeper relationships between gardening groups . In the 1980s the ACGA was deeply concerned with land tenure, a sentiment we will see reflected in the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners as well. The May 1982 and fall 1987 issues of the Journal of Community Gardening, the ACGA’s national publication, were devoted to the topics of site permanence, advocacy to change the place of gardening in city master plans and housing developments, and opinions on gardeners organizing to secure sites through ownership, land trusts, and long-term leases . In 1982, Diane Gonsalves argued community gardens should not be made portable stating, “the displacement of gardens undermines the commitment of the gardeners,plant pot with drainage depriving neighborhoods of an important stabilizing factor, in much the same way that housing displacement does” .
Gonsalves laments that gardens “remain invisible to planners. Architects, politicians, and policy makers” and “are treated like carpets that can be rolled up and moved elsewhere atwill” . In spring 1983, the ACGA published an infographic on tips for saving a garden entitled “Stop the Bulldozers!” . On the other hand, in the 1987 ACGA publication on land tenure, Gerson was advocating for gardeners to accept that gardeners will sometimes lose sites: “When it comes time to leave, you do so. Regrettably. But you don’t cry, whine, or fuss, nor do you encourage your gardeners to do so” ). Gerson argued that ‘creating a fuss’ damages the reputation of community gardening at large, and in an environment where “developers will win 98% of the time” gardeners need to know gardens are not forever. During this period from the late 1960s to the 1970s, collective urban gardening experienced a revival across the country. But by the mid-1980s community gardening was in decline. Shifts in federal and state funding left many gardening programs without the funds to support their staff or work. Yet, the commitments and sometimes projects of this era have survived to the present. During the community gardening period, San Francisco Bay Area urban agriculture communities started to develop as a vanguard leading many conceptual and political efforts to support gardening and urban improvement through agriculture. Home gardening was embraced as a key piece of sustainability of the rapidly growing communal living movement in the Bay Area. By 1971 there were more than 300 communes in the region connected by the weekly newsletter Kaliflower in which articles described home gardening techniques among other things . Kaliflower authors drew inspiration from the Diggers, a spin off from the San Francisco Mime Troupe who advocated for community self-sufficiency and practices such as dumpster diving, labeled “garbage yoga”, and theater aimed to “politicize a new way of living in the city” .
Urban communes became the launching ground for a network of Food Conspiracies, collectives who pooled food stamps, bought bulk food and shared other food resources, and later the San Francisco People’s Food System . In Berkeley, community activist Helga Olkowski and doctoral student William Olkowski, Helga’s husband, created many opportunities for Bay Area residents to learn about sustainable living. Together they developed classes at UC Berkeley on food growing, promoted the use integrated pest management across the Bay Area, started the first recycling center in the US, and help start Antioch College West, an alternative college in San Francisco with a focus on ecology. For six years, William Olkowski conducted research and education on the UCB Gill Tract Farm in Albany, now the site of an urban garden and land battle . The Olkowskis are potentially best known for the publication of two books on urban food production: The City People’s Book of Raising Food and Integral Urban House: Self-reliant Living in the City. The latter was one of the first books on “urban homesteading Lower down on the peninsula, John Jeavons and his colleagues at Ecology Action in Palo Alto started an urban farm in 1971 to conduct research on intensive food production methods. Ecology Action grew food and taught ecological agricultural practices on this farm until their lease ran out in 1980. Jeavons, a former student of UCSC’s Orin Martin, lamented, “like so much other agricultural land in the United States, our lovingly tended beds succumbed to the press of urbanization” . While their farm was initially imagined as a piece of the urban Bay region, the difficulty of maintaining land access pushed Ecology Action to find a permanent site in Northern California. Their bio-intensive method of food production requires long-term soil building, ideally over a 50-year period, and other practices that were not viable in land markets dominated by short-term leases and the loss of land to development.
However, by the 1980s, another force in bio-intensive and sustainable local agriculture was growing as a commercial venture in both rural and urban California. In 1982 the renowned Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse started growing and buying local produce . By 1986, Chez Panisse and fourteen other high-end restaurants were buying from a small urban farm, Kona Kai Farms Market Garden, in an industrial neighborhood in Berkeley . Sustainable gardening and local food sources for commercial purposes were deeply connected to the Bay Area environmental movements of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. In addition to experiments in home agriculture as connected to sustainable and often communal living, the Bay Area was enlivened with other acts to reimagine urban relationships to land, food, and people. In 1969 in Berkeley, People’s Park became a national example of a continued community occupation of land leading to the creation of community gardens, open space, and much more . In a decades-long, often violent struggle, student activists, environmentalists and social justice advocates occupied UC Berkeley land in what was considered a revolutionary act to create space for humans and nature in resistance to development. In San Francisco, artists from the San Francisco Mime Troupe, inspired by the diggers, started an urban farm as a piece of “life theater.” Here art, agriculture, and community gathering were combined to radically rethink human-nature relations . Another urban farm, the Farm, was created when project leaders, Sherk and Wickert, leased 1.5 acres of land by the side of the freeway. Community activists worked with the Trust for Public Land and the city eventually agreed to buy 5.5 acres and develop it into a park. Between 1974 and 1987 “The Farm” or Crossroads Community included artists, poets, punks, vegetables, livestock,pots with drainage holes and many others in an experiment in non-hierarchical radical ecology. At the same time, the lot next to The Farm became a key gathering space for low rider cars and Chicano cultural activists. People’s Park was an inspiration to Low Riders looking to carve out a space of their own in the mission district . After 1980, diminishing funds for community arts projects and shifting use of the space led to the decline of The Farm as it had been. The City was not accepting of the radical vision of the space and began development of a more traditional urban park, which still exists today as Portrero Del Sol Park and adjacent community gardens. During the 1970’s, Community garden programs housed under municipal departments began popping up across the country. Over forty percent of contemporary community gardening programs began in 1975 . Many of California’s contemporary community gardening programs were initiated in this period. In 1977 the California Council on Community Gardening stated “Community gardening improves the quality of life for all people by beautifying neighborhoods; stimulating social interaction; producing nutritious food; encouraging self-reliance, conserving resources; and creating opportunities for recreation and education” . San Jose’s first community garden was started in 1976 by a coalition of residents from senior associations, the Food Bank, San Jose State University students in environmental studies, UC Cooperative Extension, and San Jose Parks and Recreation. The 5-acre garden, located on land previously used for a City nursery, was named Mi Tierra and was led and tended by mainly Mexican-American residents . A year later the City started its official community gardening program. In 1993 Mi Tierra was evicted when the San Jose Ice Center was built on the land, and Mi Tierra became Nuestra Tierra community garden on another site. The garden was moved again in 2000 when the land was scheduled to be made into a golf course . This has been a common story for San Jose gardens; all of the community gardens started in the seventies have been moved from their initial sites when the City or other landholder developed the land.
In 1999 when the 25-year-old West Side Garden was evicted in order to build a library, Lilyann W. Brannon with the help of other gardeners fought the prospect of loosing more garden land. Lilyann W. Brannon, a prominent environmental activist and leader of the United New Conservationists, an environmental group started in the seventies at San Jose State University, objected to the City’s position that a community garden is an interim use until development takes place. She advocated that the City zone sites for permanent community gardens, stating: “I would like to see some dignity given to the urban agriculture” . John Dotter, San Jose community garden program director for many years, noted that community gardens and cultural gardens have been an essential space in San Jose for many groups of immigrants to continue the expression of agricultural and community identities . In a valley with rich history of farming in Japanese, Mexican, and other ethnic communities, gardens bridge rural and urban immigrant communities.In addition to San Jose, both Oakland and San Francisco initiated community garden programs in the seventies. In 1973, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors created a community gardening program under the Department of Public Works Street Tree Program and hired a coordinator to run the gardens . The greenhouse at the Laguna Honda Hospital, the site of the former victory garden, was put to use growing plants for distribution to community gardens. At the same time the coordinator assisted residents in finding sites for gardens and in obtaining insurance. When the Comprehensive Employment Training Act began providing federal funding for positions for urban improvement, San Francisco hired CETA workers to run community garden and art projects. By 1975 fourteen full-time workers were employed . Using CETA funding, Contra Costa County hired seven staff members to develop a gardening program inspired by San Francisco’s program . The state of California hired a community gardening coordinator to be housed under the Office of Appropriate Technology and published a 1977 report on the state of community gardens . The significant energy across the state was funneled into the creation of the California Council for Community Gardening , a precursor to the American Community Gardening Association . The Council organized statewide conferences, a communication network, and information sharing forums. By 1979 there were 75 community gardens managed by the San Francisco Department of Public Works. However due to the passage of Proposition 13 and the end of CETA funding, the community gardens program had already begun its decline. By 1980 the community garden program was no longer functioning . The Contra Costa program lost all but one staff member. The California Council for Community Gardening began its decline and folded in 1985. Organizer Mark West wind concluded the project ultimately did not continue because “each of us was too dedicated to our primary focus – our own projects in our own communities” . In San Francisco, Pam Pierce, Steve Michaels, and other gardeners continued the work of helping to support gardens under the name of the Urban Agriculture Coalition .