For Sale: Condo with Chicken Coop
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05.18.07
This copper house at Tryon Farm will eventually turn a greenish color.
Here is an interesting trend: Developers are selling homes built around working farms. According to the Wall Street Journal: "Catering to Americans' desire to live "green," developers around the country are creating communities on or adjoining farms, pitching views of sorghum fields, grazing livestock, and local -- very local -- food, such as eggs residents collect from the property's henhouse. The communities, however, aren't necessarily in the boondocks. Some are in suburbs or near cities."
Of course it takes a bit of green to get into these communities; they start at US$ 200K and go to a million plus. Some call it conservation and balanced growth, "catering to people's increased interest in environmental sustainability and desire for locally grown food." We would have some concerns that it is a new model for extreme low-density unserviceable suburbia, a fake farm in the burbs where one owner says "Where else can you can farm and still get take-out Chinese?"
A Barn House at Tryon Farm has a garage underneath, and a screened porch on an upper level.
There can be other surprises for people who are not used to being around agriculture. Nicole Jain Capizzi is manager of the learning farm at Prairie Crossing, where kids participate in educational activities such as feeding chickens and harvesting vegetables. She says that the first thing newcomers to the henhouse remark upon is the strong smell.
When kids see the chickens, she says, "they are amazed to find out that's where chicken nuggets come from."
Indeed, living at Prairie Crossing has made 6-year-old Ethan Bond a less finicky eater. His mother, Jennifer Bond, says the exposure to agriculture got vegetable-averse Ethan to eat lettuce and carrots, as well as hard-boiled eggs. ::Wall Street Journal
Given two conditions ...
1) if that Chinese restaurant is stir-frying bok choy from the farm, and
2) if they become affordable: cottages, not condos
... then this is a crucial strategy. If you're driving to the city every day it's hypocrisy. Otherwise, these farms are a way to clear your mind and tend the earth while opting out of the social alienation, crime, and pollution of cities.
All this high-density snobbery might happily vanish if *current realities* were truly considered. Folks inevitably do what works for them given their choices at the time. If land is still affordable and folks don't want to live in a concrete urban setting, they're not going to.
Is permaculture fake farming? Rooftop, inner city grass patch, "fake farm" -- wherever it works, it works.
What's wrong with a Chinese food place near your food-producing home? Inherently, nothing. This arrangement can be called a village, possibly *the* only sustainable living arrangment.
*If* the current economic model disintegrates , where will be the the affordable heating fuel to keep your highrise condo pipes from freezing and breaking in the winter? To truck in your food from near and far? The concrete to keep the urban landscape from disintegrating?
Better be glad for whatever food is growing in the periphery, fake farm or not, because you may be able to find your way to it, or some of it to you.
On the contrary, the future looks like a de-densifying of cities with a corollary uptick in suburban and rural density. A return to the country, if you will.
My bet: you'll see every suburbanite farming and/or densifying their properties to accommodate city refugees before you'd see a world comprised of only "the city" and "the country".
Compared to other "low density" exurb developments this could be the best thing that could happen to outlying communities even if it is a little hypocritical. It's a much healthier form of development than mcmansions, tract housing, and other forms of undesirable and poorly laid out development that are currently overwhelming farm communities on the perepherals of cities. Development in these areas is ineveitable, so well planned developments that seek to adhere at least in principle to the landscape are the best option