Urban Farming in the West

It is common to talk about the New Deal's embrace of experimentation, but among all of Franklin D. Roosevelt's many initiatives, few could rival the subsistence homesteads program for sheer unusualness. A pet project of both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, what began as the Division of Subsistence Homesteads was so conceptually strange that not even Rexford Tugwell—the head of the short-lived Resettlement Administration and often maligned as “Rex the Red”—wanted it under his purview. Intended to encourage working Americans to farm part time on small lots, the subsistence homesteads program wended its way through multiple bureaucratic homes in Washington, D.C., and ultimately produced thirty-four communities, four of which were in the far West. These four communities are the subject of Robert M. Carriker's book that, while acknowledging that the program was rife with problems, argues that the western experiment shows off some of the program's best ideals and accomplishments. The original Division of Subsistence Homesteads arose out of utopian ground with the hope that the citizens chosen to live in these communities would support a cooperative, “urban” way of life. Although the western communities in Arizona, California, and Washington might not have reached the utopian heights envisioned by planners, each of the places achieved success in one way or another: in Phoenix, for instance, the homes designed by Robert Evans were considered architectural models, while in Longview, Washington, the community “continued to generate a cooperative atmosphere of rural neighborliness” for many years (p. 152

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