In Santa Monica, community garden plots are pushing $600

At Santa Monica’s Main Street Community Garden, each plot bears the mark of its tenant. In the southwest corner, an aesthete’s low wooden fence matches the stain of twin soil beds enclosed within it. A few spots down, a conservationist’s compost pile houses rotten fruit and plant clippings.

Nestled among them, Mariel Rodriguez’s 175-square-foot plot is strewn with experiments: sheets of foil to deter garden rats, raised beds to minimize shadow and plant cloches to partition herbs.

At her family’s 400-square-foot apartment down the block, the only outdoor space Rodriguez has is a shared brick patio. But here, with dirt under her fingernails and the scent of mint in the air, she’s in tune with the natural world.

“This is all I have,” she said, gesturing to the crops below. “This is my ‘outside.’”

Soon, though, Rodriguez’s outdoor ritual may be too expensive to keep up.

Santa Monica officials later this month are set to approve 200% fee hikes for garden plots across four community gardens in the city, which would generate $30,000 in revenue and increase the public works program’s cost recovery from 20% to 60%. The proposal is pending, with the city council expected to finalize and adopt the 2025–27 operating budget on June 24.

It’s one of myriad measures city officials have put forth to compensate for a $60-million budget shortfall, resulting from a combination of pandemic- and wildfire-induced economic fallout and a tally of child sexual abuse settlements costing the city about $230 million.

Tenants at the Main Street Community Garden grow produce and inedible plants, including flowers.

Tati Simonian, spokesperson for the city of Santa Monica, said the city’s financial woes have also been “compounded by unprecedented legal liabilities, potential tariffs and funding uncertainty from shifts in federal government policies.”

The proposed price hikes may force Rodriguez to vacate her garden plot. She spent 10 years on a wait list before she finally got the plot on Main Street last year.

Under the new pay scale, the schoolteacher would pay an additional $300 a year for her midsize plot, increasing her annual fee to $450. Those with the largest plots would see a $400 hike to $600 a year.

For some gardeners, it’s a manageable expense. But for people like Rodriguez — a sole breadwinner living in a rent-controlled apartment — it’s just another stressor compounding an already grim financial reality.

“People who are able to afford [the price increase], plus able to afford all of the plants and soil and fertilizer — the organic fertilizer that it takes — plus the time … what are you, independently wealthy?” Rodriguez said.

If that’s the case, she added, “Don’t you have a yard?”

Already, Santa Monica’s community garden plots are the most expensive in L.A. County — and among the most expensive in the U.S., said Cris Gutierrez, chair of the Santa Monica Community Gardens Advisory Committee.

That’s concerning for Gutierrez and her fellow committee member Tim Bowler, who said that since the establishment of Santa Monica’s first community garden on Main Street in 1976, the goal has been accessibility for residents. (As of June, the city has four gardens with individual plots available to rent, in addition to two communally grown learning gardens.)

“We don’t want this to be a rich person’s playground,” Gutierrez said.

“This is precious,” said Cris Gutierrez, chair of the Santa Monica Community Gardens Advisory, as she did her regular rounds at the garden on Main Street. “This is the real asset.”

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

Gutierrez and her husband Randy Ziglar, who’ve grown mixed produce and inedible plants at their Main Street plot for more than 40 years, don’t have a problem paying the extra fees, she said. The committee chair even once wrote a check for a fellow gardener who was getting priced out of the place.

“We have a problem [with] creating another place of inequality,” she said.

For Gutierrez, the proposed price hikes represent “a gross misunderstanding of a young council that is legitimately trying to deal with a difficult, frankly dire, budget situation.”

Upping the community gardens’ revenue might look to public works staff and council members like a “quick fix,” she said, but it’s no “strategic cut,” and it understates the value — both material and not — of the program to Santa Monica residents.

Cris Gutierrez washes carrots at her garden plot in Santa Monica.

Plus, displacing gardeners who can’t shoulder the fees is hardly worth the “pittance” it will save the city, Gutierrez said.

“I love our [city] staff, but anybody under budget duress can panic,” she said, “and they panicked.”

Simonian, the city spokesperson, called the proposed hikes a “difficult budgetary decision” and said that public works staff is “ready to work with the Community Gardens Advisory Committee to offset the fee increases with council direction.”

Santa Monica Mayor Lana Negrete, the sole city council member to oppose the budget proposal, said the community gardens feel like a “gross place to increase fees” — especially when, “for the senior population, and for our marginalized folks who live in subsidized apartments, everything adds up for them.”

A visitor pulls a carrot from the ground at Cris Gutierrez’s garden plot.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

“It’s not in line with who we are as a progressive community that’s sustainable and green,” Negrete said.

Negrete added that the budget measure has yet to be finalized, and officials are still mulling over alternative solutions.

When Gutierrez first heard about the price increases, she was shocked. Most every city staffer had her cellphone number, she said, yet she received no more than a few days’ warning before the budget proposal, originating in the public works department, was presented to the city council.

That was especially jarring, Gutierrez said, given that the advisory committee for the last decade has repeatedly made its own attempts to increase the community gardens’ cost recovery.

A ripe strawberry rests in the soil at the Main Street Community Garden in Santa Monica.

Their primary project, long-requested by visitors, has been a channel through which people could donate directly to the gardens. A first attempt, in the form of a city account, was shot down by several different offices, Gutierrez said.

Since then, a proposed nonprofit, Santa Monica Roots, has gotten “stuck in the machinations of bureaucracy,” she said, with concerns from officials about the ethics of fundraising on city property.

“When this blew up in my face, I saw the personal betrayal of the hours that we spent on trying to get that up,” the committee chair said.

In the weeks since the budget proposal dropped, gardeners on Main Street and their neighbors have sent letters to representatives, voicing their opposition.

While Gutierrez was the sole public speaker during the May 27 budget meeting wherein the proposal was first discussed, “there will be scores” speaking against the measure at the forthcoming Jun. 24 meeting, she said.

Bowler, the advisory committee member and a site representative for the Main Street garden, said that going forward, he hopes the city will consider the gardeners’ feedback and invite them to collaborate on a more sustainable solution.

“Let’s look at the options, look at what’s equitable, what’s reasonable, and we will be on board,” Bowler said.

In between phone calls with city officials, Gutierrez last week made her rounds at Main Street, pausing tasks to chat with out-of-state visitors.

Meanwhile, Ziglar harvested a bunch of purslane from the couple’s large plot across the garden.

“That was Gandhi’s favorite vegetable, apparently,” he chuckled, then took a bite. The leafy green is in season, he said, adding that he always tries to eat within the seasons.

The garden dictates his meals, Ziglar said, the same way it dictates how he sees the world: open, generous, dancing.

A green and black caterpillar crawls on a green plant at Main Street Community Garden in Santa Monica.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)