GILBERT — Just steps from the porticos, patios, clay-tiled roofs and manicured lawns of suburbia, Kelly Saxer has gotten used to questions. As she weaves through tomato vines, snaps asparagus and generally gets her hands dirty, visitors and even some nearby residents want to know what she’s doing — and how the farm where she works wound up here.“Sometimes it feels like we’re animals in a zoo a little bit because people will walk by and they’ll just stare, you know, like gawk at us,” Saxer said.This is Agritopia, an 11-acre organic farm that’s all that remains after miles of alfalfa, corn, cotton, durum wheat and sugar beets were swallowed up by Phoenix’s roaring development.
Kelly Saxer is the lead farmer at harvests lettuce at Agritopia, a community nestled around a plot of agricultural land in Gilbert.
Annika Hammerschlag, Associated Press
In this “agrihood” — a residential community that includes a working farm — kids play outside at a school that borders vegetable fields or in communal green spaces nestled between homes. Well-dressed couples and boisterous teenagers flock for selfies and picturesque photos. Lines form at the diner featured on Guy Fieri’s Food Network show. On the farm itself, people can walk the dirt roads, rent out plots to grow their own foods or buy its produce.
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Some developers have turned to the agrihood concept in the past couple of decades to lure buyers with a different kind of amenity. At least 27 U.S. states and Canadian provinces had agrihoods as of a 2018 report from the Urban Land Institute, and more have cropped up since then.Experts say agrihoods cater to buyers interested in sustainability, access to healthy food and a mix of urban and rural life. The core aim of many projects is to “create a feeling for people,” said Matt Norris, one of the lead authors of that report.Agritopia’s founders saw change coming, and made a planIt was the late 1990s when the family behind Agritopia saw “the writing on the wall,” said Joe Johnston.The family farm was some 5 miles from Gilbert then, but it was clear the Phoenix area’s rapid growth was going to bring development to their doorstep. With his parents mostly retired and a pair of brothers interested in doing other things, Johnston got their blessing to develop the land himself rather than simply selling it.
Fae Padron, 4, plays in a “kid pod” in Gilbert’s Agritopia.
Annika Hammerschlag, Associated Press
Johnston, with a background in design engineering, was intent on “creating place,” as he puts it. The neighborhood features narrow streets and homes within walking distance of restaurants, bars, shops, small parks and fitness businesses. The farm is at the center of it.Melissa Checker, a professor of anthropology at City University of New York and author of a book on environmental gentrification, said agrihoods can appeal to people in different ways — their desire to feel environmentally conscious, nostalgia for an imagined idea of the past, increased interest in food “self-sufficiency” and even a heightened desire to be safe and connected to neighbors after the COVID-19 pandemic.“You have a kind of convergence of some commercial interests, you know, something that you can sell to people, and then also this real desire to change the way we do things,” she said.Agritopia, but not utopiaIn an ideal world, using green community space to grow food could especially benefit people who are food-insecure, Checker said. But because agrihoods are often tied to real estate prices and devel …
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