Burlington homeowners Michael Rooney and Susan Dorn built greenhouse-style hoop houses in their front yard two years ago to extend the growing season. Instead of harvesting salad greens in May or June, the couple now picks knee-high Swiss chard, kale and red mustard in early March.
“We want to control our own food as much as we can,” says Rooney, who lives on South Willard Street near Champlain College. “Sustainable living. We live in Vermont. Grow your own food. All that stuff —– we believe in all of it.”
But last month, the couple got a notice from the Burlington Code Enforcement Office that their gardening structures were a code violation and would have to come down to avoid penalties. The code office received an anonymous complaint anonymous complaints — three of them — about the homemade hoop houses.
Rooney says he was told that, under city zoning regulations, hoop houses qualify as “stable structures” and that the couple’s raised garden beds qualify as “retaining walls” — both of which require permits from city hall. So does a two-foot-high metal fence that lines the garden to keep out hungry rabbits.
“This is ridiculous,” Rooney says on a recent spring day.
Rooney and Dorn are master gardeners, certified through classes at the University of Vermont Extension School and hours of apprenticing. Their front yard on South Willard Street, a well-heeled part of town with stately colonial homes, has been turned into an urban gardener’s paradise — with bountiful gardens, peach, apple and pear trees, and strawberry beds alongside the steps that lead up a slope to their front door.
But to at least one neighbor, the hoop houses are an out-of-place eyesore. Rooney says he doesn’t know who made the complaint. He called one neighbor to inquire about it, but says he never heard back.
Dorn is the founder and CEO of RingMaster Software and Rooney is a principal at Spring Above Marketing. The couple built the hoop houses in 2010 using wood, electrical conduit and plastic sheeting. They went on the front lawn, he says, because that’s the only sunny part of his yard.
Rooney has taken his case to city councilors, the mayor’s office and members of Burlington’s Urban Agriculture Task Force, a panel established by the city council to address just these sorts of town-farm clashes. Next Wednesday, he’s meeting with Code Enforcement Director Bill Ward to show him the structures and see if a compromise can be worked out to keep them.
Ward explains that, under zoning regs, anything that remains on a property for longer than 30 days is considered a structure. He said the letter Rooney and Dorn received was a warning, not a violation that would come with fines. Warning letters give property owners a period of time — ordinarly 10 days, but in this case longer — to either take down the structure, apply for a permit or appeal the code enforcement officer’s decision.
“When we receive a complaint we’re required to investigate,” Ward says. “It’s not at the top of our priority list to go around and check people’s yards for [code violations.]”
Rooney and Dorn haven’t decided whether they’ll try to keep the structures by seeking permits — which cost $90 each and could require a public hearing before the Development Review Board. Rooney, for one, worries that if he loses, he could “set a precedent for everyone else in this town” that would come back to haunt other urban gardeners in Burlington.
“We grow food because it’s part of our lifestyle,” Rooney says. “I don’t want to have people who really can’t afford [a permit] stuck with” an adverse city decision on urban gardening structures. Rooney understands that some might find his roadside hoop houses out of place in the neighborhood, but says the front-yard garden could stand as a “nice image of Vermont — that you could actually grow all your food here.”
“This is Vermont, for goodness sake,” Rooney adds. “We’re all about sustainable living.”
Photo credit: Andy Bromage
This article appears in Home & Garden Issue.
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Elections have consequences.
If city liberals hate regulation, stop electing people whose politics require government intervention in everyone’s lives.
Meanwhile, if you want to farm, move to the country.
In a city it can be hard to have your cake an eat it too. Country mouse doesn’t feel bad for city mice….lol.
Latest News: We discovered who our complainant was thru the Freedom of Information Laws–our next door neighbor with the perfect lawn, who denied doing so. That neighbor has just moved.
Yeah, so what? So why do I see people planting huge blow up Santas and blow up Frosty the Snowmen in their front yards at Christmas time. What if I hate Christmas and don’t want to see them? What if I’d rather see a lovely garden growing in someones yard.
Oh, shut up Burlington and let people do with their property what they will. You let lousy bums set up camp on Church St., but you don’t let these people have a garden to grow their own food on their own property. GET REAL!
This is a case of an idea being beautiful (and important) enough to disqualify relevance of questions of physical beauty. This is a beautiful and important actuality! To farm one’s own land! I hope that we across America can expand our definitions of beauty to include abundance and efficiency! And that we can love our neighbor’s efforts to live well and richly.
There should be a mind your own business law.
There’s an easy answer to that: would the neighbors smell the bio-diesel or otherwise be actually touched or affected by it? If not — if there’s zero pollution — than they should be allowed to do it. If they aren’t polluting any more than all the cars driving by, well then, you shouldn’t discriminate against their fair use of their property. If they are polluting *more* than the ambient pollution levels, they are trespassing and should be required to cease to a level that respects their neighbors’ rights to their own property.
I want to be on the side of Rooney/Dorn, but it’s hard to not see both sides of this. What they’re doing with this space is inspiring but where do you draw the line? Let’s say the neighbor next door to these folks wanted to turn their front yard into an operation for something less innocuous. I wonder if Rooney/Dorn would extend the same hands-off courtesy they want to a neighbor who wanted to process bio-diesel in their front yard, or who wanted the ability to park cars on their front lawn as a favor to friends?
As citizens of this city we have a responsibility to either live by the codes in place or to work to change those codes. In this case, if it were just fruit trees and gardens or it was tucked away in the backyard it would be hard to complain, but you build a pair of greenhouses of this size in your front yard and it’s going to attract some attention, perhaps some attention that you don’t want.
I’m sure the folks at Code Enforcement would welcome you to learn more about the work they do. They’re a group of hard working people who are under appreciated. When someone makes a complaint (in this case an anonymous neighbor) they have to investigate it. If you love the greenhouses, why not support changes to city codes to allow them? That’s more productive than putting down an entire city department for operating as it is supposed to.