No Room to Grow: How Public Housing Regulations on Gardening Undermine the Right to Food

March 4, 2026

By Genice D. Nadal, Alexzandrea Bia Bartle, and Ana Luiza Potgornik Ferreira, Legal

Interns, Human Rights Clinic, University of Miami School of Law & Tamar Ezer, Acting

Co-Director, Human Rights Clinic, University of Miami School of Law

Photo by Steve Adams via Unsplash.

Picture this: a mother in public housing starts a small garden outside her unit. Maybe she’s planting collard greens that remind her of home or tomatoes she can stretch into three meals. Then one day, she walks outside to find a housing authority official pouring bleach into the soil, destroying everything she’d planted. Not because the garden was unsafe or unsightly, but because gardens simply aren’t allowed.

This isn’t hypothetical. Author Kaitlyn Greenidge describes this exact moment from her childhood. And she’s far from alone. From Tennessee to Massachusetts, public housing residents  face prohibitions on growing their own food. The Hawaii Public Housing Authority (HPHA)  banned tenants from “planting trees, shrubs, and other plants in the ground or in a pot (unless the  planting is part of a community garden authorized by the HPHA).” This is one of the more lenient  policies as many housing authorities ban gardening outright. The rationale? Avoiding “hazards.” However, there’s no track record of safety issues to justify these “heavy handed” rules. 

Access to food and housing are interconnected; while public housing provides shelter, it rarely  addresses food security. Even those who qualify for food subsidies are facing cuts. Residents who  might fill that gap through gardening are told they can’t and are forced to choose between paying  rent and buying food. A 2024 Harvard survey revealed that among lower-income renters, 26%  reported food insufficiency while only 16% fell behind on rent, suggesting that when housing and  food compete, housing wins and hunger follows. 

This is in direct contradiction to human rights norms. The international human right to housing requires access to affordable housing, where affordability entails keeping housing costs to a level  where “other basic needs are not threatened or compromised.” The right to housing fundamentally  recognizes “the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity.” The right to adequate food necessitates that “every [person], alone or in community with others, has physical and economic  access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.”  

Yet, the United States’s social and economic reality moves in the opposite direction: even as the  growth of housing costs slowly decreases, all food prices are predicted to increase 2.7%. How  come? What happened to that garden makes sense by understanding how food is treated in the  U.S. 

Photo by Getty Images via Unsplash.

Food, especially healthy and organic food, has become commodified and geared towards profitability and personal branding rather than meeting the nutritional needs of all people. Healthy food is celebrated everywhere in our culture, but rarely marketed as essential nourishment. Instead, it is marketed as youth, beauty, discipline, and self-optimization. Fresh produce spills artfully from grocery bags in advertisements. Smoothies and organic meals are framed as proof that someone is “choosing” to take care of themselves. Eating well is sold as a personal achievement rather than a shared social condition. This framing matters because it quietly shifts responsibility. Structural barriers fade from view, replaced by moral judgments about individual behavior.

For most people, however, the barrier is not desire. It is cost and access. Nearly 9 in 10 adults say healthy food costs more than it did just a few years ago, and a strong majority say those prices make eating well harder, with lower-income households most affected. More than 60% of Americans describe healthy food not as a necessity, but as a luxury. When access to nutrition is framed this way, eating well becomes a privilege instead of a right, and lack of access is treated as personal failure rather than structural exclusion.

What is happening to food is not unique. It reflects a broader shift in how essential goods are  treated. Organic and “healthy” foods circulate as premium products not because they are inherently  scarce, but because value is created through market positioning. As noted by the Special  Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, housing has already undergone this shift. Once shelter became  defined as a financial asset, its purpose as a place to live became secondary. Homes sit empty while  prices rise and people are displaced.  

Public health frameworks recognize access to nutritious food as essential to well-being, yet  housing and food policy rarely reflect this understanding. Food assistance is treated as conditional  and expendable, while public housing residents are prohibited from growing their own food, even  when doing so could directly address hunger and self-sufficiency. 

For these reasons, food security and access to healthier options are seen as a distant dream.  However, concrete examples from communities across the country show that food security is not  only possible but also attainable when they are allowed to reclaim control over food production  and distribution. 

Picture by Neshama Neshama via Facebook.

Community gardens and urban agriculture programs offer a more sustainable pathway toward food security. Collective food production can improve access to fresh and culturally appropriate food while mitigating exposure to price volatility. Moreover, communities that incentivize community gardens have seen increasing success in food production and distribution. For example, Seattle’s Housing Authority’s P-Patch community garden program serves approximately 400 people. Boston’s GrowBoston initiative has installed 390 raised bed gardens for low-income residents across the city as of May 2025. New York City’s GreenThumb, the largest community garden program in the country, maintains over 550 community gardens throughout the city, as well as supports thousands of volunteer gardeners.

These examples illustrate how relatively modest, community-based programs can meaningfully  expand food access. Most community gardens cost between $3,750 and $7,500 to establish. In  New York City, GreenThumb’s 550 community gardens are supported by approximately $2.6  million in City funds – roughly $393 per garden per month. This level of governmental investment  is minimal, especially when weighed against the social and economic costs of food insecurity in  low-income communities. 

The benefits of community gardens go even further than food security: they are a foundation for  food sovereignty. For many communities, their garden represents the realization of their right to  self-determination. By taking control of what is grown, how it is grown, and how it is distributed,  residents reclaim authority over their food systems and reduce dependence on external, profit driven supply chains. Moreover, community gardens often operate alongside broader community  development initiatives, where participants build practical skills, strengthen local networks, and  cultivate ongoing civic engagement.

It is time to update regulations banning community gardens, particularly within public housing.  These restrictions limit residents’ autonomy and reinforce the commodification of food by  prohibiting community-based forms of production. Allowing and supporting food cultivation in  public housing and other public spaces represents a low-cost, high-impact intervention that aligns  housing policy with public health, environmental sustainability, and food justice.