Two weeks ago, I wrote about bringing backyard chickens back to Rhode Island and paid special attention to the ongoing effort to repeal Woonsocket’s chicken ban. A few days later, the Washington Post ran a feature-length article on low-income Woonsocket residents’ struggles to feed their families.

My last post focused on the ways that historical justifications for chicken bans have become outdated, and also noted some health and environmental benefits of backyard chickens. The Post article casts the Woonsocket chicken issue in a new light: Woonsocket suffers from food insecurity, and backyard chickens can help.

The Post article is worth your time to read (here’s another link to it), but here are a few important takeaways: Every month, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) injects $2 million in benefits (formerly called food stamps) into the Woonsocket economy. With a local unemployment rate of 12% and only low-paying jobs available to many employed residents, a full one-third of Woonsocket residents receive SNAP benefits. In fact, some local grocery stores make up to 25% of their monthly profits on the first of the month, the day when SNAP benefits are transferred to recipients. Together, these numbers – and the article’s well-drawn profiles of several Woonsocket residents – present a picture of food insecurity.

Backyard chickens are not a panacea by any means, but they can help to alleviate food insecurity and promote economic self-reliance. They can turn food scraps, beetles, and grubs into fresh eggs. And their droppings (if dealt with appropriately) are great for growing vegetables too. They add resilience to a broken food system. You can read more about chickens and chicken care by poking around Southside Community Land Trust’s website.

Once you’re satisfied that backyard chickens make sense, you should come out to Woonsocket City Hall on Monday, April 1 at 7 p.m. to show your support for repealing Woonsocket’s chicken ban!

A genuine Rhode Island chicken. Image courtesy of eschipul @ flickr.

All over Rhode Island, people want to keep backyard chickens. The trouble is that the law often doesn’t let them.

Until 2010, Providence banned chicken-keeping entirely. That year, a coalition of residents worked together to overturn the ban. These efforts paid off – now, chickens peck away happily at sites ranging from Southside Community Land Trust’s almost-a-whole-block City Farm to my friends’ snug 1700-square-foot lot in the West End.

After this success in Providence, other cities and towns looked more closely at allowing chickens. Swanky Barrington followed Providence. The City Council in Cranston, where I live, repealed the city’s chicken ban; unfortunately, though, our mayor vetoed the repeal so the ban remains on the books (for now). As spring approaches and our thoughts turn to our backyards, a city and town in northern Rhode Island – Woonsocket and North Smithfield – are considering lifting their backyard chicken bans.

The effort to repeal the Woonsocket ban began the same way most repeal campaigns seem to: a Woonsocket zoning officer ordered a responsible chicken owner to get rid of his birds. Alex Kithes says his neighbors didn’t even realize he had chickens until he offered to share some eggs. As word spread, the city found out and issued a citation. Alex is fighting back. He has drafted a city council member to introduce a bill allowing chickens in Woonsocket, and he is lining up individuals and organizations to lend support.

CLF supports eliminating barriers to local food, and that includes legalizing backyard chickens in Woonsocket. When people keep chickens, they can cheaply opt out of industrial egg-suppliers.  A more direct benefit of backyard chickens is that small broods’ droppings make great fertilizer, while concentrated droppings from large egg-laying operations are toxic. Backyard chickens also add resiliency to our increasingly concentrated food system. And backyard chickens can even encourage organic waste diversion, eating table scraps that otherwise might be landfilled. These are the types of broad-ranging benefits that panelists recently promoted at the Rhode Island Local Food Forum.

Legalizing backyard chickens also allows residents full use of their property to grow food and helps to foster community. To better understand these points, we have to take a brief look back in history. Municipal bans on backyard chickens began with New York City in 1877, followed by Boston in 1896. Both cities were motivated primarily by concerns with unsanitary chicken slaughter; wholesale bans on chickens, however, were much easier to enforce than targeted bans on slaughter.

Over time, however, slaughter of backyard chickens has all but vanished (and is still banned in most modern chicken ordinances, though off-site processors may be available for those who want to eat their birds and not just their eggs). Sanitary concerns have largely disappeared (and sanitation is regulated in most modern chicken ordinances). And chicken bans remain on the books primarily due to worries about nuisance and image. But any well-tailored chicken ordinance will take a dual approach to nuisance: both proactive (setting minimum conditions for housing and feeding chickens, and banning noisy roosters) and reactive (allowing neighbors or municipalities to fight actual nuisance conditions). This approach allows people to keep clean, quiet birds on their property if they choose to do so.

And clean, quiet birds not only are perfectly consistent with a positive community image but can in fact foster community. Backyard chickens can be quite stylish (this coop, for example, looks even better in person!) or even all but invisible – I didn’t realize my West End friends had chickens until they paused our daughters’ play date to go outside and feed the birds. Chickens tend to be great with children, and egg-sharing can bring neighbors together. Finally, there are no known data suggesting that backyard chickens negatively affect nearby property values. The fact is that out-and-out chicken bans restrict property rights and prevent environmental benefits for no good reason at all. Everybody loses.

For all these reasons, CLF supports amending the Woonsocket backyard chicken ban. I plan to speak in favor of repealing the ban at Woonsocket’s April 1 City Council meeting, and I hope you will consider joining the growing pro-chicken coalition as well.

The Boston Harbor Hotel is innovative in maintaining public access to Boston's waterfront with its beautiful and distinctive arch.

On Friday, June 10, CLF’s Boston office had the pleasure to host 10 members of the Indonesian non-profit organization Genderang Bahari (Maritime Spirit) Movement to discuss strategies for the preservation of historic harbors. The professional exchange was sponsored by the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program and arranged by the local nonprofit organization WorldBoston.  Members of the movement are interested in gaining ideas and insight into how to best revive the approximately 80 old harbors in Nusantara, Indonesia.

CLF’s Peter Shelley spoke to the diverse group of engineers, architects, and project managers about the strategies behind historical preservation and the role of non-profit organizations like CLF in such processes. As a way to provide context, Peter described the history of relevant land and zoning laws in America.  Our guests were understandably surprised by the fact that the heart of Boston used to be intertidal mud flats (the current location of CLF’s Boston office was actually underwater in the 1700s), and that the laws we use today to protect public lands originate from the King of England’s mandates in the colonial era. Their amazement reflected the sometimes overlooked richness of Boston’s history.

The Colonial Ordinances of 1641-1647 granted private ownership of coastal property in Massachusetts as long as the public’s historic rights to fish, fowl, and navigate coastal lands were protected and maintained. Still in effect today, the old “fish, fowl, and navigate” public rights are broadly defined to include other public benefits. As such, the state can require private developers building on the waterfront to provide bathrooms or create walkways for the general public. In fact, CLF used this concept in the 1980s to ensure that the placement of the Boston Harbor Hotel, located on Boston’s waterfront, would not obstruct public access to the waterfront – this resulted in the design and construction of the hotel’s beautiful arched dome walkway, allowing the public a gateway underneath the hotel from the street to the harbor. The Indonesian delegates, having seen the hotel and its distinctive arch, recognized the significance of this legal tool.

In his advice to the delegates, Peter Shelley emphasized the need for having compelling vision, community support, and leverage, all of which should be further supported by an economic argument. When discussing leverage, protection, and potential obstacles, the conversation always returned to money, an internationally understood incentive and potential complication. One guest revealed that his non-profit organization faces a social problem as well, because nobody seems to care about the “local people by the sea.”

After Peter finished describing the role of CLF like that of a “watchdog,” the delegates were inspired and expressed their need for an organization like CLF in Indonesia to help them preserve their historic harbors. They were enthusiastic about the initiative, collecting several different ideas of how best to proceed with their project after listening to how public property is protected in America. At the close of the meeting, Peter left them with a poignant and lasting piece of advice. He reminded them that the process of creating a successful campaign is “not easy, but it’s certainly worth fighting for.”