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That $50 also comes with obligations to pay back property taxes, renovate existing buildings to meet current code standards, and improve the street-visible appe

That $50 also comes with obligations to pay back property taxes, renovate existing buildings to meet current code standards, and improve the street-visible appearance of the lot. You're paying $50 for a property that has a $50000 debt stapled to it. Also, urban soil frequently has chemical contamination. If nothing else, it often has high levels of lead contamination from mere proximity to the streets used by cars that burned leaded gasoline before it was banned. Buying multiple distressed urban lots to use as farmland is a horrible, horrible idea. If you want to buy land for traditional farm, do it in a rural area. Urban land does not make sense unless you are experimenting with vertical farming, where the grid power and piped potable water is already available, and the local soil (if any) is not going to be used anyway.

rmason 10y ago
You are wrong. If you're buying a house it might have taxes attached but not side lots if you read the site I referenced. The city is literally giving side lots away so that they are added back to the tax rolls. Also absolutely no one is going to buy a house with $50,000 of taxes attached! Instead you wait until the land bank owns it and either buy it directly from them or wait for the yearly auction. Rarely do housing sites have chemical contamination. There are however former industrial sites that do. But if you look at who is doing urban farming in Detroit it is exclusively on former residential land. Urban farming does make sense economically. Lots of young people don't have the capital to buy good rural farmland. If you're in the city you're also near great markets but the key is growing high value, labor intensive crops like fruits and vegetables. Unless you're an experienced farmer operating at scale you can almost always buy corn, wheat and soybeans cheaper from the farmer than you can grow them yourself.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I encourage you to explore the difference between property taxes within the Detroit metropolis and in rural Michigan. Whether the back taxes have been forgiven or not does not obviate the future tax bills to the new owner. The $50000 bill is the average code to bring buildings up to code. You are correct that this would not apply for side lots. But people can and have purchased houses for "$50" that included a ~$50000 obligation, for use as low-income rental properties. Such houses can be made profitable by leaning heavily on the federal Section 8 voucher program. And that's why those properties sell. As for lead contamination in urban soil... http://modernfarmer.com/2014/07/lead-urban-gardens/ http://modernfarmer.com/2014/07/lead-urban-gardens/ https://soils.org/discover-soils/soils-in-the-city/soil-contaminants/lead https://soils.org/discover-soils/soils-in-the-city/soil-cont... Urban gardening only makes sense for the most lucrative of cash crops, and those intended for consumption by rich humans. You could certainly feed yourself and your family with a well-managed plot, but you're going to have some trouble selling to anyone else, unless you serve an incredibly specific niche and have some loyal friends in the restaurant industry. The business simply doesn't scale. After the restaurant buys all it needs, you're back to the farmer's market, where even the top-shelf local CSA group can match your quality and your price, at 100 times your volume. Your only advantage is that you can deliver fragile-but-unbruised produce by hand with a bicycle fifteen minutes after harvest, rather than after an hour on a delivery truck. But in practice, hardly anyone needs that enough to pay the extra cost for it. The guy growing fingerling potatoes on a 10 acre plot just past the suburbs is going to pay off their loan and then enjoy the profits, as the urban gardener works their ass off barely doing better than break-even.

rmason 10y ago

You are wrong. If you're buying a house it might have taxes attached but not side lots if you read the site I referenced. The city is literally giving side lots away so that they are added back to the tax rolls. Also absolutely no one is going to buy a house with $50,000 of taxes attached! Instead you wait until the land bank owns it and either buy it directly from them or wait for the yearly auction. Rarely do housing sites have chemical contamination. There are however former industrial sites that do. But if you look at who is doing urban farming in Detroit it is exclusively on former residential land. Urban farming does make sense economically. Lots of young people don't have the capital to buy good rural farmland. If you're in the city you're also near great markets but the key is growing high value, labor intensive crops like fruits and vegetables. Unless you're an experienced farmer operating at scale you can almost always buy corn, wheat and soybeans cheaper from the farmer than you can grow them yourself.

logfromblammo 10y ago
I encourage you to explore the difference between property taxes within the Detroit metropolis and in rural Michigan. Whether the back taxes have been forgiven or not does not obviate the future tax bills to the new owner. The $50000 bill is the average code to bring buildings up to code. You are correct that this would not apply for side lots. But people can and have purchased houses for "$50" that included a ~$50000 obligation, for use as low-income rental properties. Such houses can be made profitable by leaning heavily on the federal Section 8 voucher program. And that's why those properties sell. As for lead contamination in urban soil... http://modernfarmer.com/2014/07/lead-urban-gardens/ http://modernfarmer.com/2014/07/lead-urban-gardens/ https://soils.org/discover-soils/soils-in-the-city/soil-contaminants/lead https://soils.org/discover-soils/soils-in-the-city/soil-cont... Urban gardening only makes sense for the most lucrative of cash crops, and those intended for consumption by rich humans. You could certainly feed yourself and your family with a well-managed plot, but you're going to have some trouble selling to anyone else, unless you serve an incredibly specific niche and have some loyal friends in the restaurant industry. The business simply doesn't scale. After the restaurant buys all it needs, you're back to the farmer's market, where even the top-shelf local CSA group can match your quality and your price, at 100 times your volume. Your only advantage is that you can deliver fragile-but-unbruised produce by hand with a bicycle fifteen minutes after harvest, rather than after an hour on a delivery truck. But in practice, hardly anyone needs that enough to pay the extra cost for it. The guy growing fingerling potatoes on a 10 acre plot just past the suburbs is going to pay off their loan and then enjoy the profits, as the urban gardener works their ass off barely doing better than break-even.