A parking lot-turned-garden in Southwest Detroit is growing several tons of free produce each year for residents in a neighborhood with some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the city.  

And the May addition of a new greenhouse and electricity at the lot at 4601 Merritt St. will allow the garden to grow to new heights and serve more neighbors.

Purple basil, salad mix, tomatoes, squash, and potatoes are among the herbs and vegetables grown in shipping containers repurposed from General Motors Co. at Cadillac Urban Gardens. Forty-one percent of residents in the census tract surrounding the urban farm live below the poverty line, according to census data – double the rate for Wayne County residents overall. 

“We don’t charge for any of our produce, which is a little bit crazy,” said Dolores Perales, co-executive director of Cadillac Urban Gardens, noting the garden typically grows around 5,000 pounds of food between May and October. 

“What we believe is to have true food equity, you have to take the price out of the equation,” she said. 

Cadillac Urban Gardens was first established in 2012 by Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision, the Ideal Group, General Motors, residents, nonprofits, businesses, schools, and other community groups. In 2023, some staff garden volunteers branched off and established Cadillac Urban Gardens as an independent nonprofit. 

While some Detroit farms implement a pay-what-you-can policy, Cadillac Urban Gardens has removed the cost completely. The new greenhouse will scale the operations up even more, extending the garden’s growing season and allowing it to grow microgreens and other foods inside. 

Residents can visit the farm between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and every other Saturday and, alongside a staff member, can harvest whatever they want. 

In addition to an open-door policy, the garden partners with local centers to distribute produce, like the Perry Outreach Center, which provides food, health, and education services to residents of the Boynton neighborhood. 

Randall Mosley, director of the Perry Outreach Center, said 100 families visit the center each month, and partnering with Cadillac Urban Gardens is a winning collaboration to offer fresh produce. 

“A lot of the people that just go to food pantries, rarely do they get meat or vegetables or fruit – or they get just six apples and that’s it. That’s not enough to sustain a family,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing for people to get fresh fruit, fresh vegetables. There’s not even a supermarket in the Boynton neighborhood.” 

The Boynton neighborhood, in 48217, Michigan’s most polluted ZIP code, earned the moniker for 42 area industrial facilities that release hazardous air pollutants. But Mosley said the industry, like the Marathon Petroleum Corporation oil refinery, gets too much of the attention for the issues afflicting the community. 

“The diet of people in the Boynton neighborhood, Melville, Ecorse – is part of the

problem. It’s not just Marathon,” he said. 

In many Detroit neighborhoods, grocery stores tend to be stocked with canned, boxed, frozen and/or highly processed foods, not fresh foods, according to the Detroit Food Policy Council. Efforts like Cadillac Urban Gardens fill the gaps. 

Food insecurity rates in the 48217 neighborhood and the 48209 ZIP code, where Cadillac Urban Gardens is located, decreased between 2014 and 2021, according to a citywide analysis by Data Driven Detroit. 

Beyond the fresh produce, Mosley appreciates the urban garden’s programming for kids and teens. Sometimes, Mosley said, food pantry visitors are resistant to taking fresh vegetables, because they may be unfamiliar with them and how to cook them, or think they don’t like them. Cadillac Urban Gardens changes perspectives at the intergenerational level, he said. 

The garden provides summer jobs and training to youth ages 14 to 24 related to environmental research, sustainable food systems, or media and development, as well as a six-week STEM camp. The garden also takes weekly volunteers and teaches them about urban farming, and cultivating young people into leaders and uplifting community elders as teachers. 

“They get kids involved planting the food, tending the garden and harvesting the food. First of all, children enjoy that. Second of all, now they start to eat the food that comes out of the garden. They’ll eat the carrots and tomatoes, and they’ll find that they enjoy them. In the next generation, you won’t see this love for processed food, and you’ll see more of  a yearning for fresh fruits and vegetables,” said Mosley. 

Perales, the co-executive director, got her start at the garden as a teenager when she began volunteering more than a decade ago. 

“Growing up in Detroit, I was always used to seeing truck traffic and having issues with my asthma because of air pollution,” she said. “The garden was the catalyst that really got me interested in the environmental field. It was the first time I was actually able to experience something that was something positive that related back to the environment.” 

In addition to leading Cadillac Urban Gardens, Perales is a planner for Detroit’s City Planning Commission. There, she works on projects like an ordinance to allow for urban livestock keeping in Detroit and an ordinance to support more composting in the city. Working for the city allows her to help Detroiters in their quest for environmental justice from both the grassroots level, and the institutional level. 

“Being able to work on the opposite end and finding ways to ensure that especially items that pertain more to the environmental field, like growing your own food, allowing certain uses on your property that promote food equity or sustainable food systems, is really impactful for me,” she said. “We want to use it as a seed starting station to grow – especially in the wintertime -microgreens, as well as shallow root plants so that we can continuously hopefully harvest throughout the winter time.”