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Milwaukee will help fund a new project led by Will Allen, the city’s guru of urban agriculture, to create 150 jobs in the city over the next three years. The project, which is being funded in part by the city’s African American Male Unemployment Task Force, plans to build “hoop house” style greenhouses on vacant lots around the city to be used by urban farmers.

Allen and his non-profit organization, Growing Power, have steadily risen in national notoriety since Allen became the first Milwaukeean to win a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2008. Allen, a former professional basketball player and marketing executive, is now one of the world’s go-to experts on locally-grown food.

will allen (photo by growing power)

Growing Power is expanding rapidly. It plans to finish a new Milwaukee headquarters for “vertical farming,” a glass-covered five-story building with food growing on each floor, by 2012. And beginning this year, the organization is expanding throughout the city, adding many more community gardens in the “Growing Capacity for the Green Economy” project co-sponsored by the city.

Last week, the Milwaukee Common Council approved $425,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant funding (from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) to help fund the ambitious  project, which Allen has promised will create 150 jobs in the city by the end of 2013.

Plans call for building 150 “hoop house” style greenhouses “on identified vacant or blighted city-owned property” throughout the city. The greenhouses, usually made by stretching translucent plastic over plastic tubing, are an inexpensive way of shielding plants while concentrating sunlight.

Growing Power plans to hire 15 full-time employees by July and then another 35 by the end of the year. In the early going, employees will help build the greenhouses, recruit new employees and install the first growing beds. In 2012 and 2013, the project will ramp up, adding 50 new workers each year to tend the gardens and collect food waste from around the city for use as compost.

tony zielinski

“While the demand for locally produced food is increasing,” Allen’s proposal says, “individuals within the target area do not have access to careers that would enable them to be a part of this rapidly emerging sector in the current economic climate.”

The project implements Allen’s vision of urban agriculture on a large scale. Ald. Tony Zielinski, who organized the unemployment task force, says he approached Allen after its formation in September. The task force had set aside the $425,000 to devote to a project, and Zielinski says he asked Allen what he could do with it. “Milwaukee is a national leader as far as urban agriculture is concerned, and we want to continue that momentum,” Zielinski says.

Allen was able to bring much more funding to the table than the $425,000 offered by the city. A budget provided to the council estimates $5 million in charitable foundation funding, $1 million from other partners, including the Milwaukee Area Technical College, which is offering High School Equivalency Diploma classes to 50 program participants, and about $3.5 million in program revenue – including from sales of food grown in the greenhouses.

According to the alderman, “Getting 150 full-time jobs for $425,000 is a great bang for the taxpayer dollars.”

Zielinski says the program’s emphasis will be on African American males, but Allen will be “the ultimate decision maker on who he hires.”

The unemployment for African American men in the city is more than 16 percent, according to federal figures, although some researchers argue the official figure underestimates black joblessness.

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