South L.A. is set to lose a community garden near USC. What's next?

Yahoo

a day ago

What was intended to be a rallying event for the USC Peace Garden turned into a day of quiet mourning as student employees and the surrounding community came to accept that the beloved green space would be forced to close.
Founded in 2022 by Camille Dieterle, a professor at the USC Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, the USC Peace Garden sits at 3015 Shrine Place — a roughly 10,000-square-foot lot with an abandoned house and shed. For the last few years, the front and backyard of the lot have grown into a flourishing ecosystem of native plants, tall fruit trees and garden beds filled with vegetables, where student employees offer gardening workshops and other activities.
But on May 28, Dieterle told the garden's three employees that USC's Real Estate and Asset Management team had made plans to relocate the Peace Garden and sell its current land, and that they had until June 30 to cease their operations.
'The university has made clear it is committed to relocating in a thoughtful and inclusive manner,' read a letter sent to garden employees on June 6, addressed by Grace Baranek, the associate dean and chair of USC Chan, and Mick Dalrymple, USC's chief sustainability officer. 'On Monday [June 9], the university will be assessing a number of possible locations to determine which ones would be feasible as a new garden.'
Garden employees announced the news in an Instagram post, saying that the land was slated to be sold and that they would be 'working tirelessly to save the Peace Garden right where it is.'
On June 7, about 15 students and community members gathered at the Peace Garden to hear updates and celebrate the space, which garners a couple hundred visitors every academic year. Attendees were encouraged to harvest as many plants as possible and spent the afternoon putting flowers into pots, picking lemongrass for tea and even uprooting a tall California poppy tree for one neighbor to take home.
'The fact that the Peace Garden is only a short walk away from campus is what allows it to be so accessible to people and for classes to happen here,' said Diāna Lūcifera, a USC undergraduate and garden employee. 'The original values of the Peace Garden were to uphold environmental justice, to uphold community, to prioritize our South Central neighbors.'
One truck from the USC Department of Public Safety arrived outside of the Peace Garden shortly before the event started on Saturday at noon, while another truck arrived at around 12:15 p.m. Students walking to and from the garden reported that Public Safety officers asked them how long the event would last. According to Lūcifera, this was the first time Public Safety appeared at a Peace Garden event.
Lūcifera, along with graduate students Sophia Leon and Diana Amaya-Chicas, are the only employees of the Peace Garden. All three resigned from their roles at the event on Saturday.
'That's what makes it even more hurtful,' said Leon to the small crowd. 'Not just the threat [of] taking this garden, but that they've made us feel like our voices don't matter — but they do.'
USC did not share the details of who made the decision, the reasoning behind it or the name of the buyer with the Peace Garden's employees and supervisor, according to Lūcifera, who also said that a university administrator did not show up to their scheduled meeting last week. A USC spokesperson told The Times that the lot where the garden sits is zoned as residential, and that it will remain as such after being sold.
'It was something that we weren't immediately expecting to do, but we did know there was possibility,' Julie McLaughlin Gray, an associate chair of USC Chan, said in an interview. 'We're excited to be able to work with the university on a new location.'
McLaughlin Gray also said that the university will prioritize choosing a location accessible to both USC and non-USC community members, and that she hopes students will continue to work at the garden.
'It's pretty impractical to move all of those trees to another location, if not impossible,' Lūcifera said.
The Peace Garden currently sits just northeast of the main USC campus, surrounded by student apartments and low-income housing. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Access Research Atlas, the garden borders a low-income neighborhood where a 'significant number' of residents live more than 0.5-miles from the closest supermarket.
One of these residents, Lucy Sanchez-Estrella, has not only found a welcoming community at the Peace Garden, but also uses it as a regular source of fresh produce.
'I come Friday, Saturday and Sunday — three times a week,' said Sanchez-Estrella, who also volunteers at the garden. 'It is very sad to me that this garden is going to close because here I have found peace, tranquility, I have made new friends, new companions.'
Sanchez-Estrella and her husband have been regulars at the Peace Garden for the last year. She enjoys using the garden's herbs to make tea, which she shares with students.
The Peace Garden's student employees "have introduced [to] me how to plant, how to harvest what I myself have put into the earth,' Sanchez-Estrella said. 'I've connected with them a lot in this garden. They're like family to me.'
The garden has roughly a dozen volunteers and is also home to several cats that community members plan to help get adopted. One, Sunshine, has become the garden's de facto mascot.
The loss of the USC Peace Garden isn't an isolated incident — green spaces across L.A. have struggled to survive amid gentrification and cutbacks on water supply during times of drought. Last November, L.A. County launched its first Office of Food Equity, which has named community gardens as one area it aims to support.
'There's a kind of growing recognition of the importance of community gardens from a resilience standpoint,' said Omar Brownson, executive director of the Los Angeles Community Garden Council. 'They might not necessarily always be large in scale, but they really create these important breaks and spaces for people and nature and health to all come together.'
USC has seen a number of sustainability initiatives during the six-year term of President Carol Folt, who announced in November that she would retire from her position on July 1. As employees of the Peace Garden, Lūcifera, Amaya-Chicas and Leon were part of the USC President's Sustainability Internship Program. Now, some students question the university's commitment to sustainability.
'I've learned in my environmental classes just how important green spaces are, not only for mental health, but just for general well-being of the city and for climate change,' said USC graduate student Val Katritch, who lives in an apartment near the Peace Garden. 'The fact that USC has made this decision has completely made me distrust the sustainability programs.'
Some students are still committed to keeping the Peace Garden in its existing location. During Saturday's event, recent USC graduate Sophia Hammerle created a GroupMe for community members to stay in touch. While the students have not made efforts to buy the land themselves, they have begun collecting community testimonials and information surrounding the sale of the land in hopes of keeping the garden in its current location.
'Any sort of organizing that happens will be in the name of not going down without a fight,' Hammerle said.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.