The Equity Factor

Growing Jobs at an East Baltimore Urban Farm and Incubator

A 3.5-acre urban farm and food incubator is set to open in East Baltimore next year. By tapping into the purchasing power of local institutions, it could find a steady stream of revenue.

A rendering of the Baltimore Food Hub.

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East Baltimore is set to become the home of an expansive urban farming operation and kitchen incubator. The Baltimore Development Corporation approved a deal last week for the Baltimore Food Hub to set up shop just north of the Johns Hopkins medical campus, a move expected to create 100 jobs in the first three years.

Baltimore Food Hub will, according to the Baltimore Business Journal, “pay the city $500,000 up front and $400,000 in a takeback mortgage for land and city-owned buildings at 1801 E Oliver St., property that is seen as a gateway to Baltimore for its proximity to train tracks used by Amtrak.” The proposed deal is estimated at $16 million.

Slated to be up and running in fall 2014, the 3.5-acre site will house a multi-purpose food operations campus with a kitchen incubator, urban farm and for-rent commercial business, which I assume will help with revenue streams. I wrote earlier this month about the rise of public interest incubators, which take the Silicon Valley model and apply it to small businesses with a stake in the local economy. Getting residents involved in the service industry, a consistently growing field with promises of job growth, is sound logic, especially when tied with a farm. Health and fresh produce will be part of the DNA. And while Baltimore Food Hub might have an urban farm, it’s singularly focused on fostering sustainable local businesses.

But as Dax-Devlon Ross detailed in this week’s Forefront story, East Baltimore has a checkered history with John Hopkins and development. The Baltimore Food Hub will have to take special measures to not look like it will just move into the neighborhood with complete disregard for residents. Marisela Gomez, who lived and worked in East Baltimore for 17 years, explained to Ross the disconnect between the university, development and longtime residents:

“Communities do not exist in isolation, separate from their neighbors,” Gomez said. “They exist relative to each other. While this grand institution of health care teaching and services has continued to grow and expand its mission, its neighbor has continued to deteriorate. Why this disparity between these two neighbors?”

I’m a big supporter of Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives, a group that builds equity at the neighborhood level through worker-owned businesses, creating living-wage jobs in low-income pockets of Cleveland. The Green City Growers Cooperative, an urban farm that opened in February as part of Evergreen, sells fresh produce to grocery stores and Cleveland-area food service companies.

The Baltimore Food Hub should take pages out of Evergreeen’s playbook. Though the Business Journal noted partnerships planned with the local restaurant Woodberry Kitchen, I’d like to see them tap into local anchor institutions’ purchasing power — the John Hopkins cafeteria system would be a solid place to start — for a steady, reliable stream of contracts. It would be good optics for the university and keep revenue and taxes not only in the city proper, but in East Baltimore.

I talked with the Food Hub’s project manager Greg Heller who cleared up the record to say that the project is, in fact, working with a similar model as Evergreen. Anchor procurement is part of the business model. Heller, who previously was the project manager on the Dorrance H. Hamilton Center for Culinary Enterprises, a food incubator in West Philly that Next City reported on this fall, said they’re using that as a model in Baltimore. “The whole point of that was connecting the kitchen incubator with anchor institutions,” he said. “I took that same approach to the Baltimore Food Hub to incubate and accelerate small, community-owned businesses. We’re using anchor institutions and local procurement to seed and accelerate small, local businesses. And that’s really at the core of the project.”

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Bill Bradley is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Deadspin, GQ, and Vanity Fair, among others.

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Tags: equity factorbaltimoreanchor institutionsurban farmingworker cooperatives

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