Can farming save Detroit? - Fortune

Can farming save Detroit? - Fortune


DETROIT (Fortune) -- John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. Once a star stockbroker at American Express, he left 13 years ago to found his own firm. Today Hantz Financial Services has 20 offices in Michigan, Ohio, and Georgia, more than 500 employees, and $1.3 billion in assets under management.

Twice divorced, Hantz, 48, lives alone in clubby, paneled splendor, surrounded by early-American landscapes on the walls, an autograph collection that veers from Detroit icons such as Ty Cobb and Henry Ford to Baron von Richthofen and Mussolini, and a set of Ayn Rand first editions.


With a net worth of more than $100 million, he's one of the richest men left in Detroit -- one of the very few in his demographic who stayed put when others were fleeing to Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills. Not long ago, while commuting, he stumbled on a big idea that might help save his dying city.

Every weekday Hantz pulls his Volvo SUV out of the gated driveway of his compound and drives half an hour to his office in Southfield, a northern suburb on the far side of Eight Mile Road. His route takes him through a desolate, postindustrial cityscape -- the kind of scene that is shockingly common in Detroit.

Along the way he passes vacant buildings, abandoned homes, and a whole lot of empty land. In some stretches he sees more pheasants than people. "Every year I tell myself it's going to get better," says Hantz, bright-eyed, with smooth cheeks and a little boy's carefully combed haircut, "and every year it doesn't."

Then one day about a year and a half ago, Hantz had a revelation. "We need scarcity," he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. "We can't create opportunities, but we can create scarcity." And that, he says one afternoon in his living room between puffs on an expensive cigar, "is how I got onto this idea of the farm."

Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz thinks farming could do his city a lot of good: restore big chunks of tax-delinquent, resource-draining urban blight to pastoral productivity; provide decent jobs with benefits; supply local markets and restaurants with fresh produce; attract tourists from all over the world; and -- most important of all -- stimulate development around the edges as the local land market tilts from stultifying abundance to something more like scarcity and investors move in. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He'll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit's east side. "Out of the gates," he says, "it'll be the largest urban farm in the world."

This is possibly not as crazy as it sounds. Granted, the notion of devoting valuable city land to agriculture would be unfathomable in New York, London, or Tokyo. But Detroit is a special case. The city that was once the fourth largest in the country and served as a symbol of America's industrial might has lately assumed a new role: North American poster child for the global phenomenon of shrinking postindustrial cities.

Nearly 2 million people used to live in Detroit. Fewer than 900,000 remain. Even if, unlikely as it seems, the auto industry were to rebound dramatically and the U.S. economy were to come roaring back tomorrow, no one -- not even the proudest civic boosters -- imagines that the worst is over. "Detroit will probably be a city of 700,000 people when it's all said and done," says Doug Rothwell, CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan. "The big challenge is, What do you do with a population of 700,000 in a geography that can accommodate three times that much?"

Whatever the answer is, whenever it comes, it won't be predicated on a return to past glory. "We have to be realistic," says George Jackson, CEO of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. (DEGC). "This is not about trying to re-create something. We're not a world-class city."

If not world class, then what? A regional financial center? That's already Chicago, and to a lesser extent Minneapolis. A biotech hub? Boston and San Diego are way out in front. Some think Detroit has a future in TV and movies, but Hollywood is skeptical. ("Best incentives in the country," one producer says. "Worst crew.") How about high tech and green manufacturing? Possibly, given the engineering and manufacturing talent that remains.

But still there's the problem of what to do with the city's enormous amount of abandoned land, conservatively estimated at 40 square miles in a sprawling metropolis whose 139-square-mile footprint is easily bigger than San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan combined. If you let it revert to nature, you abandon all hope of productive use. If you turn it over to parks and recreation, you add costs to an overburdened city government that can't afford to teach its children, police its streets, or maintain the infrastructure it already has.

Faced with those facts, a growing number of policymakers and urban planners have begun to endorse farming as a solution. Former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, now chairman of CityView, a private equity firm that invests in urban development, is familiar with Detroit's land problem. He says he's in favor of "other uses that engage human beings in their maintenance, such as urban agriculture." After studying the city's options at the request of civic leaders, the American Institute of Architects came to this conclusion in a recent report: "Detroit is particularly well suited to become a pioneer in urban agriculture at a commercial scale."

In that sense, Detroit might actually be ahead of the curve. When Alex Krieger, chairman of the department of urban planning and design at Harvard, imagines what the settled world might look like half a century from now, he sees "a checkerboard pattern" with "more densely urbanized areas, and areas preserved for various purposes such as farming.

The notion of a walled city, a contained city -- that's an 18th-century idea." And where will the new ideas for the 21st century emerge? From older, decaying cities, Krieger believes, such as New Orleans, St. Louis, Cleveland, Newark, and especially Detroit -- cities that have become, at least in part, "kind of empty containers."

This is a lot to hang on Hantz. Most of what he knows about agriculture he's picked up over the past 18 months from the experts he's consulting at Michigan State and the Kellogg Foundation. Then there's the fact that many of his fellow citizens are openly rooting against him. Since word leaked of his scheme last spring, he has been criticized by community activists, who call the plan a land grab. Opponents have also raised questions about the run-ins he's had with regulators at Hantz Financial.

But Detroit is nothing if not desperate for new ideas, and Hantz has had no trouble getting his heard. "It all sounds very exciting," says the DEGC's Jackson, whose agency is working on assembling a package of incentives for Hantz, including free city land. "We hope it works."

Detroit's civic history is notable for repeated failed attempts to revitalize its core. Over the past three decades leaders have embraced a series of downtown redevelopment plans that promised to save the city.

The massive Renaissance Center office and retail complex, built in the 1970s, mostly served to suck tenants out of other downtown buildings. (Today 48 of those buildings stand empty.) Three new casinos (one already bankrupt) and two new sports arenas (one for the NFL's dreadful Lions, the other for MLB's Tigers) have restored, on some nights, a little spark to downtown Detroit but have inspired little in the way of peripheral development. Downtown is still eerily underpopulated, the tax base is still crumbling, and people are still leaving. The jobless rate in the city is 27%.

Nothing yet tried in Detroit even begins to address the fundamental issue of emptiness -- empty factories, empty office buildings, empty houses, and above all, empty lots. Rampant arson, culminating in the annual frenzy of Devil's Night, is partly to blame. But there has also been a lot of officially sanctioned demolition in Detroit. As white residents fled to the suburbs over the decades, houses in the decaying neighborhoods they left behind were often bulldozed.

Abandonment is an infrastructure problem, when you consider the cost of maintaining far-flung roads and sewer systems; it's a city services problem, when you think about the inefficiencies of collecting trash and fighting crime in sparsely populated neighborhoods; and it's a real estate problem. Houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $15,000.

That sounds like a buying opportunity, and in fact Detroit looks pretty good right now to a young artist or entrepreneur who can't afford anyplace else -- but not yet to an investor. The smart money sees no point in buying as long as fresh inventory keeps flooding the market. "In the target sites we have," says Hantz, "we [reevaluate] every two weeks."

As Hantz began thinking about ways to absorb some of that inventory, what he imagined, he says, was a glacier: one broad, continuous swath of farmland, growing acre by acre, year by year, until it had overrun enough territory to raise the scarcity alarm and impel other investors to act. Rick Foster, an executive at the Kellogg Foundation whom Hantz sought out for advice, nudged him gently in a different direction.

"I think you should make pods," Foster said, meaning not one farm but many. Hantz was taken right away with the concept of creating several pods -- or lakes, as he came to think of them -- each as large as 300 acres, and each surrounded by its own valuable frontage. "What if we had seven lakes in the city?" he wondered. "Would people develop around those lakes?"

To increase the odds that they will, Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Where there are row crops, Hantz says, they'll be neatly organized, planted in "dead-straight lines -- they may even be in a design." But the plan isn't to make Detroit look like Iowa. "Don't think a farm with tractors," says Hantz. "That's old."

In fact, Hantz's operation will bear little resemblance to a traditional farm. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State's agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings.

He's really excited about apples. Hantz Farms will use a trellised system that's compact, highly efficient, and tourist-friendly. It won't be like apple picking in Massachusetts, and that's the point. Score wants visitors to Hantz Farms to see that agriculture is not just something that takes place in the countryside. They will be able to "walk down the row pushing a baby stroller," he promises.

Crop selection will depend on the soil conditions of the plots that Hantz acquires. Experts insist that most of the land is not irretrievably toxic. The majority of the lots now vacant in Detroit were residential, not industrial; the biggest problem is how compacted the soil is. For the most part the farms will focus on high-margin edibles: peaches, berries, plums, nectarines, and exotic greens. Score says that the first crops are likely to be lettuce and heirloom tomatoes.

Hantz says he's willing to put up the entire $30 million investment himself -- all cash, no debt -- and immediately begin hiring locally for full-time positions. But he wants two things first from Jackson at the DEGC: free tax-delinquent land, which he'll combine with his own purchases, he says (he's aiming for an average cost of $3,000 per acre, in line with rural farmland in southern Michigan), and a zoning adjustment that would create a new, lower tax rate for agriculture. There's no deal yet, but neither request strikes Jackson as unattainable. "If we have reasonable due diligence," he says, "I think we'll give it a shot."

Detroit mayor Dave Bing is watching closely. The Pistons Hall of Fame guard turned entrepreneur has had what his spokesman describes as "productive discussions" with Hantz. In a statement to Fortune, Bing says he's "encouraged by the proposals to bring commercial farming back to Detroit. As we look to diversify our economy, commercial farming has some real potential for job growth and rebuilding our tax base."

Hantz, for his part, says he's got three or four locations all picked out ("one of them will pop") and is confident he'll have seeds in the ground "in some sort of demonstration capacity" this spring. "Some things you've got to see in order to believe," he says, waving his cigar. "This is a thing you've got to believe in order to see."

Many have a hard time making that leap. When news of Hantz's ambitious plan broke in the Detroit papers last spring, few people even knew who he was. A little digging turned up a less-than-spotless record at Hantz Financial Services. The firm has paid fines totaling more than $1 million in the past five years, including $675,000 in 2005, without admitting or denying guilt, "for fraud and misrepresentations relating to undisclosed revenue-sharing arrangements, as well as other violations," according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. (Hantz responds, "If we find something that isn't in compliance, we take immediate steps to correct the problem.")

Hantz Farms' first hire, VP Matt Allen, did have an established reputation in Detroit, but it wasn't a good one. Two years ago, while he was press secretary for former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Allen pleaded guilty to domestic violence and obstructing police after his wife called 911. He was sentenced to a year's probation. Hantz says he has known Allen for many years and values his deep knowledge of the city. "He has earned a second chance, and I'm willing to give it to him," he says.

Some of Hantz's biggest skeptics, ironically, are the same people who've been working to transform Detroit into a laboratory for urban farming for years, albeit on a much smaller scale. The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network counts nearly 900 urban gardens within the city limits. That's a twofold increase in two years, and it places Detroit at the forefront of a vibrant national movement to grow more food locally and lessen the nation's dependence on Big Ag.

None of those gardens is very big (average size: 0.25 acre), and they don't generate a lot of cash (most don't even try), but otherwise they're great: as antidotes to urban blight; sources of healthy, affordable food in a city that, incredibly, has no chain supermarkets; providers of meaningful, if generally unpaid, work to the chronically unemployed; and beacons around which disintegrating communities can begin to regather themselves.

That actually sounds a lot like what Hantz envisions his farms to be in the for-profit arena. But he doesn't have many fans among the community gardeners, who feel that Hantz is using his money and connections to capitalize on their pioneering work. "I'm concerned about the corporate takeover of the urban agriculture movement in Detroit," says Malik Yakini, a charter school principal and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which operates D-Town Farm on Detroit's west side. "At this point the key players with him seem to be all white men in a city that's at least 82% black."

Hantz, meanwhile, has no patience for what he calls "fear-based" criticism. He has a hard time concealing his contempt for the nonprofit sector generally. ("Someone must pay taxes," he sniffs.) He also flatly rejects the idea that he's orchestrating some kind of underhanded land grab. In fact, Hantz says that he welcomes others who might want to start their own farms in the city. "Viability and sustainability to me are all that matters," he says.

And yet Hantz is fully aware of the potentially historic scope of what he is proposing. After all, he's talking about accumulating hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of acres inside a major American city. And it's clear that he views Hantz Farms as his legacy. Already he's told his 21-year-old daughter, Lauren, his only heir, that if she wants to own the land one day, she has to promise him she'll never sell it. "This is like buying a penthouse in New York in 1940," Hantz says. "No one should be able to afford to do this ever again."

That might seem like an overly optimistic view of Detroit's future. But allow Hantz to dream a little. Twenty years from now, when people come to the city and have a drink at the bar at the top of the Renaissance Center, what will they see? Maybe that's not the right vantage point. Maybe they'll actually be on the farm, picking apples, looking up at the RenCen. "That's the beauty of being down and out," says Hantz. "You can actually open your mind to ideas that you would never otherwise embrace." At this point, Detroit doesn't have much left to lose. To top of page

May the new year bring a steady diet of common sense

May the new year bring a steady diet of common sense

This is the time of year when we reflect on the past year and we plan to make improvements in our lives, usually in the form of resolutions, for the new year.

During the past decade, many scientific studies suggested and even concluded that eating well is directly connected to living well. I think most of us know this, but there are so many temptations that it bears reminders. So, I’m reminding you (and myself) that we need to make good choices when we eat. And, while I am convinced that there is always room for an occasional indulgence in an otherwise healthful diet, you need to start with a good diet.

This means eating seven to nine fruits and vegetables every day, swapping out simple carbohydrates such as white rice, white bread, sodas and sugary cereals, and replacing them with complex carbohydrates from whole grains such as whole wheat, brown rice, quinoa and wheat berries.

Drinking eight glasses of water a day is also important to stay nicely hydrated, and to allow toxins to be removed from your body through your kidneys. Also, for good heart health, it’s important to reduce our intake of highly saturated animal fats like butter, cream and cheeses, and to replace some of those fats with more heart-healthy ones such as those from extra-virgin olive oil, nuts and nut oils, avocado oil, canola and sunflower oils and low-fat dairy products. Add good sources of protein from beans and grains, and you will have a very good diet.

If we mainly eat this sort of diet, we’ll have room for the occasional creamy cheese that we all love, the piece of yummy cake and the delicious gravy on top of those hard-to-resist, rich mashed potatoes, without standing in the way of better health. Also, eating a good diet helps to maintain a proper weight. Add 30 minutes a day of exercise, an average of eight hours a night of sleep, and we can keep our immune systems strong, or at least stronger than if we just ate junk everyday and hung out on the sofa.

Fruits and vegetables are very low in calories, so it’s better not to cover their fresh flavor with loads of high-calorie toppings. The calories really do add up fast. Check out a book of calories and you’ll be shocked. Fruits and vegetables and whole grains are rich in fiber and this makes us feel full, something that helps us to eat less. When was the last time you pigged out on brown rice with tamari-roasted carrots, onions and broccoli? Now, try this experiment with say, doughnuts. Actually, please don’t, but I think you know what I mean. I wish you a healthy and happy new year, filled with many blessings.

Here, is my recipe for Breakfast Quinoa with Dried Blueberries and Bananas. Quinoa is a whole grain, with 44 percent of your daily fiber needs in one serving, is rich in minerals, and it has the highest amino acid content of any grain, so it’s a good source for protein. It originated in the Andes and is one of the oldest grains known. It has a nutty flavor and it cooks in less than 15 minutes, so it’s possible to make this hot cereal even on a workday. You can buy organic quinoa in the rice and pasta section in most supermarkets. Before using, always rinse your quinoa thoroughly, in a fine mesh strainer to remove the slightly bitter flavor.

BREAKFAST QUINOA WITH DRIED BLUEBERRIES AND BANANAS

- 3 cups low-fat organic milk or organic soymilk

- 2 tablespoons pure maple syrup or brown sugar or pomegranate molasses

- ¼ cup dried blueberries

- 1 cup organic quinoa

- 2 large bananas

Combine the milk, maple syrup and dried blueberries in a heavy 2-quart pot and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Meanwhile, measure the quinoa into a fine mesh strainer and rinse thoroughly under cold running water. Drain. When the milk mixture reaches a simmer, add the quinoa and stir well to combine.

Reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer for 12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the quinoa is tender but still a bit “al dente” firm in the middle. Cover and let sit for 2 minutes, then ladle into 4 bowls and top with slices of banana. Makes 4 servings.

Frank and Claire Criscuolo, owners of Claire’s and Basta restaurants, produce this column for the New Haven Register. Contact them at ClaireCris@aol.com. She is the author of “Claire’s Corner Copia Cookbook” and “Claire’s Italian Feast.”

The War on Vegetables

The War on Vegetables
Ingredients
By Leah Koenig
Published December 30, 2009, issue of January 08, 2010.

Last November, I koshered my kitchen for the first time. I did so with the full understanding that my decision came with certain compromises, like giving up my favorite cheeses and my delicious but uncertified collection of vinegars. While a bit heartbreaking, these were sacrifices I was willing to make as I welcomed in my new lifestyle. If only I had known that I might have to give up salad, too.

Leafy salad greens, along with berries, asparagus and a variety of other produce, have come under serious scrutiny in the kosher world over the past decade. There’s nothing treyf about these particular fruits and vegetables, except that they have a tendency to attract insects, which are halachically forbidden. Once they are removed from a spinach leaf or the inside of a raspberry, the produce is theoretically fit to eat. But kosher agencies like the Orthodox Union and KOF-K argue that certain bugs (for example, aphids, thrips and mites) are too small to spot easily, but large and common enough to be compromising.

As a result, the kosher industry and a growing number of consumers have started to eye their refrigerator crispers with suspicion. Meanwhile, new products have emerged, like vegetable soaps, and light boxes that make insects easier to see. While most Jews probably still have never heard of light boxes, for some they’ve become a way of life. All catering companies certified by Star-K, for example, are required to use them, and two years ago, the company started selling them directly to consumers for home inspection.

But why the heightened interest in insects now? One answer, according to the Orthodox Union’s Web site, is Rachel Carson, the scientist whose 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” led to a national ban of DDT and other pesticides. As Menachem Genack, CEO/rabbinic administrator of the O.U., has stated, “Since the days of Rachel Carson, the federal government has quite correctly limited the use of insecticides on food… therefore, knowing how to check for these insects has become increasingly important.” In other words, when it comes to kashrut’s bug restriction, organic produce is actually deemed more “dangerous” than its conventional counterparts. This explanation seems historically anemic, however, since the kosher laws long predate the use of pesticides, and produce has been organic-by-default for most of human history.

The actual reason for the insect fixation has little to do with a 20th-century biologist and everything to do with bagged lettuce. Pre-washed salad greens were a late but powerful arrival to the American love affair with industrial convenience foods. As they, along with shredded coleslaw, baby carrots and similar products, have grown in popularity, they unwittingly opened the door to kosher certification.

“Value-added [meaning “processed”] products made all the difference,” Rabbi Tzvi Rosen, who edits Star-K’s journal, Kashrus Kurrents, told me. “The Halacha was always clear about bugs, but now the awareness about it has been heightened.” Kosher consumers know to look for hechshers, kosher endorsements, on packaged foods, but until recently, that category didn’t include fresh produce. Now that the line is blurred, the broccoli sitting quietly on the edge of our plates has become the center of attention.

While not necessarily the stuff of daily headlines, the increasing preoccupation with bug infestation has the potential to change the kosher diet dramatically, and not for the better. Every major certification agency has guidelines on its Web site (or, in the case of the O.U., for sale on a 90-minute DVD) about proper inspection. The Chicago Rabbinical Council takes things a step further by banning the use of fresh Brussels sprouts and other produce that, because of their tightly packed leaves or small crevices, are deemed too difficult to inspect adequately. Similarly, the Kashruth Council of Canada prohibits catering services from using fresh broccoli, artichoke leaves, frisee, mixed greens, oyster mushrooms, curly spinach, watercress, dill, curly parsley, blackberries and raspberries.

Perhaps only a handful of people mourn the loss of Brussels sprouts. But many believe that there is something larger at stake here. As these industrial standards begin to trickle into people’s homes, they encourage stilted norms, including the incorrect notion that certain “seed bearing plants,” which God gave to humans to eat in Genesis, might not be fit for consumption, after all. Some argue that eventually, whole categories of fruits and vegetables could be considered untrustworthy — a stance that could, ironically, further deter kosher keepers from seeking out the healthy, organic, unadulterated foods so highly recommended by nutritionists and food experts. (Not incidentally, bagged lettuces and baby carrots both have been linked to food-borne pathogens, like salmonella and E. coli contamination — both unfortunate side-effects of industrial food production.) On the fleyshik side of things, hormone-free and free-range meat is becoming increasingly possible to find under kosher auspices. But the vegetable part of the meal seems headed in the opposite direction.

Perhaps more important, kosher agencies overstep their bounds by beginning to hechsher fresh produce. From the industry’s perspective, any expansion of business is understandably a good thing. But these agencies were developed to take the guesswork out of kosher consumption, not to discourage the use of inherently kosher fruits and vegetables, or to profit by creating a new need for inspection DVDs, light boxes and the like. The lesson to be learned here is to not give up common sense. The halachic prohibition against insects is not the issue; kosher caterers and consumers alike should certainly check for, and remove, bugs. But when this honest concern turns grocery shopping and dinner preparation into battle scenes, we can only lose.

Leah Koenig writes a monthly column on food and culinary trends. She can be contacted at ingredients@forward.com