After three years of worldwide publicity, City Hall bureaucracy and local controversy, Hantz Woodlands Detroit is set for a public hearing Monday and a possible City Council vote Tuesday, Laura Berman writes in the Detroit News.
Whether the redefined development will be approved remains anyone's guess. But on Friday, Hantz Woodlands president Mike Score and three east side activists who represent the Lower Eastside Action Plan — a consortium of 11 neighborhood associations and groups — signed an agreement.
What was originally announced in the darkest days of 2009 as potentially "the world's largest urban farm" has undergone a sea change: Scaled down to an initial 125 acres that hop and skip around occupied homes (with an eventual option to acquire another 180 acres in a one-mile area farther east), Hantz Woodlands is now being pitched as a community-friendly, mowed and maintained green space with 15,000 trees planted in two years.
