Greetings front yard garden supporters,

On May 27th the Falcon Heights City Council unfortunately voted 3-2 not to rescind their interim ordinance prohibiting front yard vegetable gardens. Council Members Miazga and Wehyee voted to rescind. Council Members Andrews, Leehy, and Mayor Gustafson voted to keep the interim front yard vegetable garden ban.

Despite your +10,000 signatures including many Falcon Heights residents, intense media pressure, dozens of testimonies advocating to rescind this policy, and intensive direct advocacy to Council Members, we lost this first battle. But the fight is not over.

Where this issue goes will ultimately be up to affected Falcon Heights landowners, but many have suggested that the City has left itself legally exposed by voting and reaffirming a policy that is potentially discriminatory and unconstitutional. In the advocacy process, a number of lawyers reached out interested to support. We prioritized healthy civic engagement and working through the policy process first, and are now examining other options.

As many of you know, the Twin Cities region has been engulfed in tumult since late May due to the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, by the Minneapolis police. This tragedy has sparked local, national, and woldwide action to combat racism. George Floyd was killed 48 hours just over the river from Falcon Heights, and the vote not to rescind the garden ban was taken on May 27th in the "calm before the storm" before our region erupted in protest.

For the last two weeks, the Twin Cities streets have filled with protestors, several neighborhoods have experienced significant damage, and the presence of both the National Guard and outside extremists. Our Twin Cities community is forever changed for waiting too long and doing too little, too late to address the racism that persists in our community and within ourselves. 

We ask you to consider how the tragic killing of George Floyd and this front yard vegetable ban targeting an Asian-American immigrant family are related. We have a long, sad history in the US of ensuring our foundational promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for some but not others. 

Sometimes racism is violent and direct- a knee on the neck for nine minutes in broad dayling, and sometimes institutional discrimination acts through implicit fears and assumptions, double-standards, and leveraging the policymaking process to inequitably target people of color. Sometimes racism is unjustly ending of people's of color's lives and/or locking them up, and sometimes it is unjustly and inequitably ending or locking up their plans, dreams, creativity, talents, and joy. 

Historically, land use is a major pathway through which institutional discrimination operates, using redlining tactics to corral people of certain races and ethnicities to certain neighborhoods, restricting commercial development and/or access to public infrastructure (i.e. transit) in these areas through City planning, decimating communities of color with emminent domain and federal works projects (i.e. highways), and siting of environmental hazards near low-income housing and vice versa. In the context of these larger dynamics of land use and institutional discrimination, we would almost go so far as to call this front yard garden ban a case of modern-day redlining.

The events of recent weeks have also encouraged Minneapolis and many surrounding communities to, in a matter of weeks, radically reimagine what public safety could look like. We stand committed that gardens, in the front yard or otherwise, are part of the solution to many of our interlocking problems. We should be lifting up solutions like these, rather than pre-emptively banning them based on the fears or the few.

Our team is engaging in the commission process to help develop and pass new policy as quickly as possible, but it seems increasingly clear that working through the commissions will take a number of months. At a minumum, the 2020 garden season is out for our friend Quentin, and any other new would-be front yard gardeners in Falcon Heights. As the policy development process continues, other routes may be needed to resolve the injustice of this policy and how it was applied. So stay tuned, everyone, and as always thanks for your support.

Finally, see below for an op-ed by the organizing team that ran today in a Twin Cities paper reflecting on our advocacy effort to strike down this front yard garden ban, its relationship to institutional discrimination, and what we as gardeners and community can do in our homes and lives to stand in solidarity.