On roof, nonprofit to grow food for area

New project in St. Louis aims to help meld divide

ST. LOUIS -- A two-story concrete building on the edge of downtown St. Louis is bearing its heaviest load 88 years after construction.

Mary Ostafi, an architect who founded the nonprofit Urban Harvest STL in 2011, has led an effort to dump 40 tons of dirt on the building's 9,000-square-foot roof and grow organic vegetables in a venture called the Food Roof Farm.

To some degree, Ostafi is sating a craving to become an urban farmer that set in while studying for a master's degree in leadership and sustainability in Sweden.

But on a larger scale, Ostafi sees the project fostering a lumbering urban revitalization in St. Louis, which has seen its core downtown population increase 133 percent to 8,300 residents over the past 10 years during a conversion of old commercial buildings into loft apartments, according to a Downtown STL report released in May.

More importantly, she said, the Food Roof Farm could help bury the Delmar Divide, an invisible barrier along Delmar Boulevard that splits the city socio-economically and racially. The endeavor's location, at 1335 Convention Plaza, is just north of Delmar Boulevard on the depressed side. But sandlot volleyball courts and a bar at the property have been steadily pulling people across the boundary.

"St. Louis is definitely a one-block-at-a-time kind of city, and it starts with grass-roots initiatives," said Ostafi, who worked on the Cesar Pelli-designed Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, Wis., to begin her architecture career. "The initiative to create a community space was already here, and we're building upon that to help meld the divide."

While Urban Harvest STL's undertaking represents the first roof farm in downtown St. Louis, over the past few years precursors have sprouted in U.S. cities such as New York, Seattle, Chicago and Milwaukee, said Anthony Mayer, chief executive of Hanging Gardens of Milwaukee, a firm focused on green infrastructure design, implementation and products.

"For community development and redevelopment, I see food roofs as the fastest growing green roof sector, at least east of the Rocky Mountains," said Mayer, who began working with Urban Harvest STL two years ago. "It's the rage."

When Urban Harvest STL was planning the Food Roof Farm project, it sought consultation from Brooklyn Grange, a 5-year-old company in New York that operates farms covering 2.5 acres on two roofs, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Long Island City, Queens. Brooklyn Grange is also negotiating a lease for its third farm in the New York City area, said Gwen Schantz, chief operating officer of the company.

Urban Harvest STL's request was hardly unique: Each year more small businesses, landlords, planners and policymakers seek advice from the company, she said.

"There's a wide interest in rooftop farms because there are so many benefits, from environmental to job creation and food creation," Schantz said. "There's also a lot of interest from landlords that want to increase the value of their buildings."

Ostafi approached the building owner, Beau Reinberg, about putting a farm on his roof three years ago after Urban Harvest STL lost its lease on a community garden site. Reinberg, who bought the building in 2008 with plans to put a restaurant on the roof, also envisions the farm as another way to erase the Delmar Divide. But leasing the roof to a unique user still had to make financial sense instead of being a public-relations gambit, he said.

When trying to determine a lease rate, he took into account the nonprofit group's goals as well as the value of reduced energy bills and roof upgrades such as the addition of a waterproof membrane. Reinberg also researched what landlords typically charged operators of rooftop billboards and cellphone towers. The parties eventually agreed to a five-year lease that starts at $2,500 annually in the first year and escalates to $7,500 annually in the final year.

"I don't know if eight years ago we would have said that the highest and best use for this property was sand volleyball, a storage facility and a farm on the roof," Reinberg said on a warm May day when workers -- and nature -- began dumping 3 inches of water on the roof to test the membrane for leaks before the farm's construction began. "But I think that you get through four or five years of a rough economy in real estate and you start to become pretty creative in figuring out what's going to work."

The roof farm concept has grown out of the broader adoption of green roofs, said Bob Fisher, owner of Midwest Green Roof of Arlington Heights, Ill., an installer of Urban Harvest STL's roof system. But generic green roofs typically feature sedums that don't require a lot of water, and he suggested that the value of local food production in communities would generate more demand for roof farms that could equal, if not surpass, traditional green roof installations.

The project includes a greenhouse and beehives, and eventually, it will add a chicken coop. The greenhouse will grow seedlings for the farm and micro greens to sell to nearby restaurants.

Urban Harvest STL expects to derive the lion's share of its revenue from nearby residents who will pay an upfront fee to pick up produce throughout the growing season, and it's renting garden beds to as many as 20 residents for a suggested donation. Those programs are also geared toward fulfilling Ostafi's goal of generating community involvement at the garden.

Still, Ostafi views the Food Roof Farm as the first of many.

"To be self-sufficient, we'll need to scale up to several more rooftops to where they're generating the revenue needed to support expenses," she said. "But we want to learn how to do it right, so that's exactly what we're going to do for the next couple of years."

SundayMonday Business on 07/06/2015

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