Baltimore Community FellowshipsGuidelines | Fellows | Fellows Profiles
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Baltimore, Maryland
2007
As a freelance editor of academic books and journals, Miriam Avins, 42, use to spend her days fixing professors’ prose. But since moving to Baltimore’s Better Waverly neighborhood in 2003, she spends many hours up to her elbows in dirt, tending tomato, okra and cabbage plants. Avins’s path to community gardening is actually the story of an activist in the making, and she plans to use her fellowship to start a land trust to preserve community gardens and other green spaces.
When Avins and her family moved to Baltimore, a burned-out shell of a house was next door to their new home. A month after moving in, Avins learned her homeowners’ insurance was being canceled due to the abandoned house. She pushed the city to raze it, and then she and her neighbors cleaned up the vacant lot left behind, clearing out weeds and litter. She envisioned a community garden that would bring neighbors together.
With help from an enormous rototiller and many hands, the first garden—Swiss chard, zucchini, tomatoes—was planted in April 2004 and dubbed Homestead Harvest. But like many community gardens, its fate wasn’t secure. When the long-absent property owner agreed to sell to a developer who wanted to build an apartment building, an idealistic idea for a land trust became an imperative.
“Baltimore Green Space: A Land Trust for Community-Managed Open Space” will own community-managed open lands. Avins envisions that private owners will be able to dispose of properties in exchange for a tax benefit. The city could transfer properties under community management to the land trust. It also could foreclose on abandoned lots being used as community gardens and transfer them to the trust. “When city residents have gone to the trouble to turn a vacant lot into a place of beauty and community-building, they have equity in the property that should be recognized and protected,” Avins says. “Baltimore Green Space will be a way to do that.”
