How community gardens do (and don’t) address food apartheid in South Dallas

In South Dallas, where grocery stores are scarce and food apartheid is a reality, the City of Dallas and other funders have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in community gardens. These gardens demonstrate the benefits of locally-grown produce, but it’s unclear what impact they have on food access in South Dallas.We reached out to a dozen projects around South Dallas, to talk with gardeners and farmers about the highs and lows of urban agriculture efforts across neighborhoods. We focused on sites marked by the city’s Urban Agriculture and Community Health Explorer.Of these, three sites are no longer active: Nella Roots Gardening, Unity Community Gardens and the Wyatt-Shockley Community Garden. Three more gardens — TR Hoover, Dallas Masjid, Cornerstone Baptist Church and the Community Garden on Peabody — were unable to be reached for this story.Unity Community had been operating at a vacant residential lot in the Mill City neighborhood, not owned by organizers, until a builder began constructing a home on the site in December 2022. Wyatt-Shockley owned their land but lacked the time and resources needed to navigate the zoning and permitting they needed to set up city utilities, water being the most important.The active projects in the...