Garden Walks: Improving access to community gardens in New Haven
This post was written by Jam Lian as a part of their 2025 Lazarus Summer Internship.
Working at the Yale Farm this summer has enabled me to think deeply about what agriculture can do for American cities. Cities like New Haven are often defined as urban, in opposition to rural, disconnected from the land and food that sustains them. However, community gardens and urban farms allow us to reclaim the land, to regain control over our sustenance and livelihoods. As a matter of policy, urban agriculture is more than just another way to produce calories and pounds - it is a way for the city to establish, localize, and govern itself.
For urban planners, it cannot be ignored.
One of New Haven’s greatest strengths is its extensive network of community gardens, farms, and nature preserves, over 50 of which dot its urban fabric from Westville to Fair Haven Heights. Unified under Gather New Haven and the New Haven Land Trust, these community gardens form a crucial pillar of New Haven’s food system, providing access to fresh food for thousands of residents. However, food insecurity remains an issue for 22% of New Haveners, twice the national average—and more remains to be done.
Understanding food insecurity in New Haven requires an understanding of its geographic inequality. Outside downtown, poverty is concentrated in specific neighborhoods, such as Newhallville and Fair Haven, which consequently limits access to fresh food from grocery stores and other markets. While New Haven’s community gardens are able to help fill some of the gaps, their heavy geographic concentration leaves some neighborhoods underserved.
As we look towards building future community gardens, this project proposes quantitative recommendations on where to site them to best address poverty and food insecurity in New Haven.
Fig 1. Existing community gardens in New Haven (green dots), and heatmap of poverty (dark red = 1000 people.)
Like any other public service, a community garden’s impact depends on the area and number of people it can reach. To be practicable and useful to a community, gardens must be within walking distance from their volunteers and customers. Thus, it is important to define each garden’s walkshed—the area that can be reached on foot from that garden. Since previous research suggests people are willing to be involved with gardens at most a kilometer or 1.5 kilometers away, I used OpenStreetMap data on street networks to generate walksheds for every existing community garden as well as candidate locations for new community gardens.
Fig 2. Example 1km walkshed.
To generate candidate locations, I used New Haven’s map of Silver lots—vacant and unused lots that could be theoretically bought and converted into a community garden, of which there are over 400. From there, I computed scores to estimate the number of impoverished people currently being reached by each existing walkshed, and how many more people could be reached by each candidate location’s walkshed. Using these scores, I wrote a greedy algorithm to take these candidates and rank them from most to least effective—creating a simple list of recommendations.
Fig 3. New proposed community gardens (green), existing community gardens (blue) and their walksheds (1km)
There are, of course, significant limitations on these locations—many do not have suitable sunshine, space, or configuration for a community garden. Additionally, the difficulties of engaging a community, starting up and building infrastructure, and finding funding remain. However, for New Haven government or Gather New Haven, these recommendations offer a good starting point to build off of, and adjacent locations on local parks have great potential for urban agriculture while still filling geographic gaps in New Haven’s foodscape.
This project has enabled me to explore the intersections of geographic data, food systems, and urban planning—interests that I’ll continue to pursue at Yale. I’m excited that my work will offer urban agriculture advocates in New Haven a concrete place to work from, and I’m hopeful that it can be used to further expand New Haven’s network of community gardens—ultimately reducing food insecurity in the city.