On Wednesday, March 26, the man who owns the land under Bushwick City Farm walked up to the gate that volunteers had kept open for 15 years, grabbed their padlock, and threw it in his car. “We were really unaware that the situation had changed until Wednesday, when he showed up quite upset,” longtime volunteer Spike Appel told THE CITY. The owner, Faramarz Roshodesh, put it more bluntly: “I just don’t want any headaches. This is too much. I’m done!”
If you have biked or walked past the corner of Lewis Avenue and Stockton Street, where Bushwick meets Bed-Stuy, you have seen it: two vacant lots that volunteers turned into a working farm in 2011, with two dozen chickens, 60 raised vegetable beds, and an aquaponics system, all of it giving away free food, per THE CITY. During the worst of COVID, a kitchen operating out of the farm handed out as many as 1,800 free meals a week. Now the gate is chained and the people who ran it are on the outside.
The farm never had a real lease. It operated on Roshodesh’s land, by his tolerance, the whole time. In 2017 he sent volunteers a letter telling them they had days to shut down, then reversed himself after a protest and public outcry, THE CITY reported. The place that fed the block for a decade and a half was always one bad week away from this.
This time the bad week was a long one. According to THE CITY, Roshodesh is more than $550,000 behind on property taxes across the two lots: $285,865 owed on 23 Lewis Avenue and $267,771.20 on 354 Stockton Street, a debt that has climbed as the neighborhood rezoned and reassessed around him. On top of that, the city’s Department of Buildings hit the property with a $1,250 fine for a 10-foot gazebo built without a permit and a $2,500 fine for an unauthorized electrical hookup tapping a streetlight, with a hearing set for April 15. For Roshodesh, the farm stopped being a favor and turned into a liability.
After former Mayor Eric Adams ordered limits in late 2023 on how long migrant families could stay in city shelters, people with nowhere else to go started sleeping on the farm grounds, hundreds over roughly three years, per THE CITY. Volunteers tried to keep the space running as a farm while that happened. “I personally kicked them out probably a hundred times,” Appel told THE CITY, describing waking sleepers in the morning. By November 2024 volunteers were testifying to the City Council that the farm “is now overrun with rats and trash, and it has been difficult to maintain the space clean and safe,” THE CITY reported. The farm was never built to absorb a migrant crisis, and the strain helped push the owner to walk.
Two things were happening on the same lot. It gave the block free food and a green space for kids, and it had become a place where people with nowhere to sleep ended up. Both relied on the same unpaid volunteers and the same untaxed lot, and when the owner quit, both lost at once.
The volunteers’ plan now is to get the city to take the land off Roshodesh’s hands and protect it for good. They want it folded into GreenThumb, the NYC Parks program that, per NYC Parks, has supported community gardens since 1978 and now backs more than 550 of them across the city, making it the largest urban gardening program in the country. The catch: the Parks Department told THE CITY that while it met with the group in 2025, “there is currently no active discussion or plan for the city acquiring the farm,” and any acquisition would have to grind through the city’s full land-use review process.
The politicians are circling, at least. In early May, when volunteers gathered to mark the farm’s 15th anniversary while it sat locked, Council Member Chi Ossé and Assembly Member Jabari Brisport showed up, News 12 Brooklyn reported. Ossé, who represents the district, said his office has discretionary funds that could go toward tax relief or even buying the property, and he aimed a direct appeal at the owner: “The city can help in terms of financial burden, in terms of the hurdles to this space. So let’s have a conversation. Let’s sit down. This is a plea to you.” As of that report, News 12 said it had reached the phone number listed for the owner and was still waiting to hear back.
For the record, Bushwick Daily flagged this corner as in trouble years ago, when the farm last looked like it was on the verge of closing. This time the lock is already off and in someone’s trunk.
If you grew vegetables here, dropped off compost, or just took a bag of free produce on a bad week, time is short. Every week the gate stays chained is another week of spring planting lost, and the longer the lot sits idle the easier it is for the city to treat it as a settled question. The councilmember who said “this is a plea to you” is the one with the discretionary money and the leverage to make a deal real. You can reach Chi Ossé’s District 36 office, which covers Bedford-Stuyvesant, at 718-919-0740 or [email protected], listed on his official NYC Council page, and tell him a 15-year farm that gave away 1,800 meals a week is worth the discretionary line. The pressure that saved this place in 2017 is the only thing that has ever worked on this corner.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
