Why do councils not use median strips, parks and other unused areas to plant fruit and vegetables?

Question

there are many areas unused in each city and town. These are all covered with usless grass. Unless your a cow. why not plant these with food for the community instead of paying workers to mow they could cultivate.

Answer 1

The curse of the commons.  If noone owns it, it will not be productive.  Noone will have incentive to work it unless they get benefits.  Cities are not farmers.  They would have to employ people.  It is not like there is a shortage of land.  Governments are always paying farmers not to grow.

Answer 2

Why not just use the fertile areas of the earth as bread baskets and ship it here like they do already?

Answer 3

In a way, they do!

Have you never heard of allotments?

Answer 4

ummm, how many kids, or others, would get hit, running over to, and back from, the median.

really bad idea -- once you get past the coolness of it.

additionally, they'd drop fruit in the street, that would dry up and stick and be hard to clean.

they'd also attract animals that you'd rather not have.

and make cars swerve to avoid them, causing accidents.

most certainly it'd be nice to have apples, or ???? for folks to snack on while they're out.

but there are just too many bad things that would happen.

sorry.  :-(

Answer 5

Would you actually eat strawberries that came from a planting on a median next to major arterial roadway?  

I like fresh strawberries, but there is no way I would eat one that had spent its entire life coated in road dust, diesel soot, dog c**p, and loogies, even after it had been pressure washed and spent a day next to 100 k's of Co-60.

Answer 6

This has been studied in Cleveland and Utica.  Both city councils agreed that and fruits or vegetables would likely be stolen by homeless people and addicts, in addition to costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.  These plantings would induce more of these types of people to move there, and these cities decided they did not want to encourage homeless people and addicts.  The Utica city council called such an effort to be a "waste of money and man-hours."  It sounds good, but it's a poor idea.