Approximately 19 million people across the U.S. today are living in food deserts – places where it’s difficult or impossible to get fresh healthy food within a couple miles of home. The challenge is especially prevalent in lower income and rural areas.
As architects who specialize in affordable housing, we can’t help but look at this problem and see an opportunity (and an imperative) to seek out ways to address it through design. How can we design projects that give back to their neighborhoods in new ways, providing more than just shelter? Can the housing itself help eliminate a food desert? The challenge is always balancing ambition with affordability, but if we get it right, the payoff would be transformative for residents and communities alike.
Those were some of the questions we were asking ourselves ahead of a recent tour that members of the STUDIO team took to a hydroponic herb and vegetable planting operation called BeatBox Farms in Denver. Built vertically into a reclaimed 320 square foot shipping container and located behind veggie-focused restaurant, Vital Root in the Tennyson neighborhood, the farm supplies Vital Root – along with three other Highlands restaurants Root Down, Linger, and El Five – with fresh greens harvested weekly. Using only 4 gallons of water per day, they produce the equivalent annual yield of a 1.5-acre farm – a 99% reduction in water use than traditional farming practices.
But because BeatBox runs an organic operation – hoping to at some point receive their bonafide organic certification – their number one obstacle is the presence of pests – mostly aphids. Unwilling to sacrifice their organic direction, their fixes for the pests are more complex: natural deterrents, predatory insects like lady bugs, and occasionally – as a last resort – the scrapping and replanting of the entire operation.
Thankfully – according to our guide and the chief operator of BeatBox Farms, Cori – he’s only had to resort to that strategy twice. Good thing, too, because at any given time, the operation is capable of growing 7,800 plants simultaneously and is supplying all four restaurants it serves with around 20% of their weekly herb and vegetable orders.
In turn, the menus of all four restaurants don’t only share pride in BeatBox’s operation, but reap the flavorful benefits of locally grown, organic greens. The STUDIO team got to try a couple of them – Wasabina Mustard Greens and Tat Soi – fresh off the vertical hydroponic walls, and they were exploding with flavor. The former, a lattice green of robustly spicy yet
inviting nuance of horseradish or more delicate wasabi; the latter, a sturdy, bitter leaf crisp when served raw, yet often cooked down to something more decadent.
Even though we also dined at Vital Root after the tour, the trip wasn’t just for fun and flavor. The tour allowed our STUDIO team to take a deep dive into the operation of hydroponic farming and think about how we could incorporate it and modular construction into future affordable housing projects.
Successfully doing so could address a lot of social and economic inequities facing affordable housing at large. A hydroponic farm could not only solve access to fresh vegetables for residents, but it could also create educational and professional opportunities for tenants. Yields from the farm could create community connections to farmer’s markets, grocery stores, bars and restaurants, which could earn money to support the operation and other community programs.
The farm could additionally serve as a catalyst for bringing residents closer to nature and to their community. People might naturally gravitate from the hydroponic farm to exterior green spaces and more traditional community gardens. Perhaps they’d want to host their own markets, which would further strengthen ties in the community.
And, according to BeatBox operator, Cori, there are some hydroponic shipping containers that are actually being used to grow tree seedlings into saplings ready for on-site planting. If that’s the case, why couldn’t an affordable project incorporating hydroponic design for the purpose of addressing food deserts and spurring community connection, use their hydroponic shipping containers to initially grow trees to be planted on site? We could increase the tree canopy on site while reducing the carbon footprint of a project’s landscaping.
It’s easy in our profession to become singularly focused on the task at hand: we’re designing housing. But when we pause to ask what a community truly needs and what will help it thrive for decades — that’s when design starts to do more.
BeatBox Farms reminded us that even a single design decision can ripple outward, creating lasting value. The potential for that kind of impact is exactly why we do this work.
