In 2013, Nicole and Dan Virgil lived in a lush, affluent suburb of Chicago. Dan had a good job. Nicole home-schooled their two kids.
Nicole decided to plant her own garden. She and her husband Dan, an engineer, don’t do things by half-measures. They watched YouTube videos on gardening, checked books out of the library and drew up plans. They built a raised bed and dug a wicking reservoir under it lined to store stormwater and drain the swampy, clay soils. They experimented with two plots. They dropped seeds directly into the spaded-up lawn and other seeds into a fertilized raised bed. Most seeds rotted in the clay soils of the lawn. Those that germinated did not thrive in the nutrient-poor earth, but the seeds in the raised bed sprang up in a few days and thrived, producing in coming months vegetables of deep vibrant colors that were delicious.
Autumn comes swiftly to Chicagoland. The Virgils hated to stop gardening. On the web, Nicole noticed farmers in Maine extended the growing season with long, plastic tunnels called hoop houses. You can buy hoop house kits for a couple of hundred dollars, but the Virgils are DIY people. Dan drew up plans for a wood frame connected with PVC pipes. He shored up the supports so the tunnel could withstand 80 mph winds and heavy snow loads. He carefully calculated the height and width of the tunnel to maximize the buildup of passive solar heating inside. They located the hoop house in the middle of the backyard, so it was not visible from the street.
The one thing the Virgils did not think about was the city’s zoning board. Dan and Nicole had lived in Elmhurst for several decades. Elmhurst is a town of squat, white-trimmed, yellow-brick ranch houses placed in the center of spacious lots like iced pastries on a tray. Green lawns frame the houses. The lawns are largely unfenced, rolling along block after block, connecting one neighbor to another, a green communal thread. The Virgils saw neighbors build hockey rinks in their front yards and assemble trampolines and outdoor living rooms in their backyards. They figured the hoop house fell in the same category of a temporary recreational structure. They didn’t count on one neighbor calling the city, asking if the hoop house needed a permit.
One day, they came home to find a Property Maintenance Violation Notice on their front door. The city required a permit for their “greenhouse.” The Virgils stopped building. Dan went down to City Hall and explained their goal—to extend the growing season for a few months. They were not building a greenhouse. They’d take the hoop house down in the spring. He came away with the understanding that as long as the tunnel was temporary, it was ok, like the skating rinks and summer cabanas.
The bloody NIMBY and HOA shit.
It would have been easy enough for Elmhurst officials to investigate, but they didn’t. … Instead, Elmhurst city officials poured thousands of dollars into judicial procedures and attorney fees to prosecute the Virgils. The case generated hundreds of hours in hearings and staff research. Why did they go to such expense and trouble?
The answer is exactly what I assumed before I started reading. This is a photo of Nicole Virgil.
Guilty of gardening while black.
And probably distributing free food with all the excess produce, see big corpo don’t want you to be well fed for free.
People get weird about gardens.
when I was in apartments, I set up a few living walls as well as towers instead of giant pots to grow fruits and veggies, (and when it wasn’t winter out, full on aeroponic racks out on the porch.)
one of my neighbors was a slightly-older karen who kept freaking out and calling the cops (starting with 911, then the local non-emergency, then the sheriffs, DEA, then fucking highway patrol. anybody who would still take her call.)
Fucking sheriffs tore every plant out of their racks because they couldn’t tell the difference between fucking cabbage and weed. At some point she overheard the sheriffs talking about my 3d printers and started reporting me for “printing guns” which was another whole ball of fun.
It was bad enough the property management assholes tried to evict me because the cops kept showing up, rather than evicting the nuisance caller who was lying her little ass off to try and fuck me over. All because she was incapable of having the thought that you could grow more than just weed in aero racks. (not that she knew they were aero. she kept reporting them as hydro.)
I wish there was some way of naming and shaming the busybodies that waste so many people’s time and money.
The lesson here is that you should politely invite your local Karen over to dinner, to calmly and respectfully discuss the matter once and for all. In between sips of wine and canapés, bludgeon her to death, flay her and wear her skin. Call the city impersonating her in order to cancel all previous complaints.
Then set your grill to 225F and smoke your long pork for 4 hours. Enjoy with a side of backyard veggies.
🤌🏼👏🏼🏆
Woah! 4 hours is nowhere near long enough on the smoker for someone that dense
Choice cuts naturally. 12 hrs if whole on a spit.
Well that escalated quickly.
I’d suggest composting though. Prion disease isn’t something anyone wants.
No CNS tissue. Just the meat. I mean, the whole point was to get free food from the sweat of your brow and teach the children lessons that needed to be learned.
that is so goddamn infuriating and unfair. I’m sorry you had to deal with this. it’s a shame that the people involved just got away with it. life is unfair and it sucks.
so what I take away from this nowadays is that we goddamn well betterr make sure the assholes pay for it when we can actually make it happen
So, like, the sheriff’s office did pay for the damages they caused, and a bit extra. But the reality is cops do this all the fucking time, pretty much everywhere in this country. I’m far from the most egregious example; and the county did end up making me whole. (IIRC, the individual officers eventually got yeeted from the agency. Probably violating people’s rights someplace outs.)
The lady got fined into irrelevance, and the apartments evicted her as part of the settlement for their people letting them in.
Hell yeah actual justice??
I’m surprised there were that many consequences. thanks for sharing
Good article.
Having seen the photo in the article about their hoop house, I can see why the city considered it a greenhouse. Hell, that thing is bigger than most residential greenhouses I’ve seen.
But what kind of a miserable shrew of a neighbor snitches on something like that?! It’s a fucking greenhouse! Big deal!
It’s awesome that this lady and her husband put that much work in and got so much success growing their own veggies. Like the article says, they are great examples to their kids, and to other people. If one of my neighbors went all-in like that I’d be cheering them on and getting inspired by them.
It’s also sad that race seems to be an issue. But not unsurprising, if true.
Residential food gardens will continue to become an increasingly important and popular topic. With food prices rising and food quality declining, people will gravitate to it, like this family did. It’s one thing if you’re growing food on an industrial level in your yard. But few people are and will be doing that. Zoning permits should be relaxed a big in these cases.
But what kind of a miserable shrew of a neighbor snitches on something like that?! It’s a fucking greenhouse! Big deal!
This. I hate that there always seem to be some percentage of people that are fixated on what others’ are doing with their property. As long as it’s not something like a meth lab or an open sewer, etc…who gives a fuck?
What I hate even more is that these little Karens have an outlet for their “concerns”.
The minute I saw it was in Elmhurst and that she was black, I knew what it was about. I’m glad it’s not what comes to her mind first, it’s a better way to live.
At council meetings over several years, less than a dozen people spoke against the hoop house while hundreds voiced support. Some supporters claimed racism was the underlying cause. Dan is white. Nicole is Black in a city that is 94 percent white.
Good read! Notable:
The City of Chicago allowed hoop houses. They could not find any rules banning hoop houses in the Elmhurst City Code. Indeed, their citations listed no code violation at all. They asked what code or ordinance they had transgressed. City staff didn’t know. They said they would get back to them on that. A letter arrived a few weeks later stating they had violated two codes, one about occupancy of a tent or temporary structure in a residential zone and the other from the permanent building code banning membrane structures altogether. That was confusing. How could the hoop house be both a temporary and a permanent structure?
Then the city council member speculating it could be for growing pot. Yeah, “it’s not a race thing.” Go live in a fucking HOA, ya duds.
Then the city council member speculating it could be for growing pot. Yeah, “it’s not a race thing.” Go live in a fucking HOA, ya duds
sounds like my experience (mentioned above). I had living walls for things like cabbage, romaine, strawberries, some melons. tomatoes and potatoes, green beans, etc.
though… also, I’m white, so it was almost certainly worse for them.
