The Waters Wheel, LLC

My idea, “Heal This City” (HTC) will demonstrate how PURE, FRESH food, grown locally, is the medicine needed to heal our city's economy from the bottom up &, also, to heal its citizens from the inside out. As you'll read below, besides Health, HTC will also impact Education & the Environment.

LA-2050's award will start 4 high-production, circulating-water farms, a virtual economy-in-a-neighborhood, in Council District 1, 8, or 9 (TBD). These will be designed compliant with municipal zoning code that would, otherwise, outlaw traditional, petrochemical & poison-dependent, soil-based farming.

In the selected neighborhood, HTC's farms will be located 10 to 15 minutes walking distance from every home in the service area. Typically, the heat of asphalt/concrete during summer keeps people indoors. HTC farms will cool the service area with greenery & give an incentive for neighborhood residents to stroll. Tranquil waterfall farms will be structured in climate controlled greenhouses, surrounded by green, park-like settings, producing plant nutrient with on-site fish aquariums. Farms will generate 6 to 10 times more produce per square foot, in (small & large) vacant lots, compared with traditional, industrial farms that work vast acres of land in distant, rural settings. HTC farms will use 5% of water needed by soil-based farming, helping to conserve water in a critical period of drought. They release no pollution into the environment.

Local jobs will emerge, paying substantially more than minimum wage. These will be supported by ongoing sales of produce. Culinary programming will be coordinated, with friends & family dinners to be served. Priced at cost, they'll introduce neighbors to healthful & delicious nutrition designed (& proven) to increase healthful living, & even save lives (search “May I Be Frank,” the movie, on Google search).

Grown in the place where people reside, HTC's fresh foods will be rich in living enzymes from the moment they are picked. They will be sold to consumers the same day. Grown without pesticides or herbicides, this food is more pure & better tasting than organic foods. It is not filled with preservatives & chemicals, as is the food that arrives by truck from hundreds of miles or (by airbus) from thousands of miles away. HTC will improve diets, enable better health for local families. In HTC’s target districts, long-standing poverty exploded in the aftermath of the great recession of 2008-09. Here, communities are tortured by the likelihood of potentially lifelong malnutrition. This problem is an outgrowth of urban blight that emerged during the troubled civil rights, 1950-60 era. Local children from that time are the disease-prone adults of today, crowding emergency rooms & clinics with chronic heart & other organ ailments, diabetes, obesity, & mental illness.

In fact, these souls were crippled before the time when we discovered that a child undernourished in her first three years will not be able to effectively learn throughout a lifetime of standard education. So, in addition to chronic health problems, devoid of healthy learning tools, a whole generation of people have been effectively prevented from prospering. HTC will open doors to a new future, buttressed in its resolve by the dozens of studies that prove the value & healthful effects exposure to nature has on people living in hardscape urban settings. With exposure to nature in the context of food cultivation, the available rewards increase in terms of confidence, self-esteem & leadership; discipline & a sense of self-sufficiency also result. As HTC’s economic model is proven viable, banks will step up to invest in its urban-farming economy. Already, Chase Bank, Playa Vista, has expressed interest, knowing growth will occur where there was practically nothing in which to invest.

Beyond nutrition, as important as that is, the fundamental change that HTC will realize is transforming a generation of young people by exposing them to nature & the ancient discipline of food cultivation. In grammar, middle, & high-schools, HTC's mission is to propagate farms throughout Los Angeles. By using school lands to establish garden-enhanced curriculum, students are empowered to learn better & to innovate in development of new, urban farming tools. implements are being designed & fabricated, shedding light on yet another economic engine of the new urban agriculture. Combining these assets with existing curriculum, students will learn the economics of “farming the American city”, establishing themselves as a growing army of urban farmers that can expand farms statewide, nationally and internationally.

Following graduation from high-school, students will help to propagate farms for retirement homes and impoverished neighborhoods. There are also hospital targets, such as Kaiser Permanente, that is seeking to enable the same goals HTC is focused on in underserved communities.