As community farm dispute spirals into lawsuits, refugee farmer takes a bittersweet win

A monthslong land dispute between refugee farmers who cultivated plots at New Roots Community Farm in City Heights and the community nonprofit managing the land has escalated to several lawsuits.

For Fatima Abdelrahman, a refugee farmer who has been barred from entering the farm since January, the escalation comes with a temporary bittersweet win: On Thursday, following the approval of a temporary restraining order, she and her family were able to reenter the garden, located on a two-acre strip of greenspace between roadways.

“Everything is gone,” Abdelrahman said after seeing her crops that rotted in her absence.

The City Heights Community Development Corporation is suing Abdelraham and her daughter for trespassing, as well as the land’s last-known owner, the Hubner Building Company, in an attempt to obtain the deed to the land. Meanwhile, Abdelrahman, a longtime advocate for the community garden, is suing the nonprofit for unlawful eviction.

When the farmers learned last fall that the City Heights CDC, which took over management of the farm in 2020, didn’t have a lease on the land, Abdelraham was part of a group of farmers who demanded the nonprofit prove it has the rights to manage the farm. They said they would not sign plot agreements or pay fees without that proof. The nonprofit never showed documentation and barred the farmers from the property.

The lawsuits were filed in late February and early March, just weeks after San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott revealed that the City Heights CDC never had a lease to the property on which the farm is located, nor was it the owner. In the February letter, Elliott also said the city did not have the authority to issue a use permit to the farm’s original developer, the International Rescue Committee, because the city doesn’t own the property either. Furthermore, a community garden isn’t an allowed use of the land, largely made up of public street easement, she said. 

After their plot agreements expired in January, the farmers and allies from numerous community organizations gathered to protest that the nonprofit locked the farmers out of the property, saying they did so without legal standing. During the gathering, which was also a potluck celebrating the formation of their own organization with which they hoped to seek a lease to the land, the farmers cut the locks and entered the property.

After the City Heights CDC-hired security guard called the police, he was unable to provide the San Diego police officers with documentation that the nonprofit had jurisdiction over the land. Meanwhile, feeling they had proven their point, the farmers agreed to vacate the property.

With or without a plot agreement, Abdelrahman, who has farmed the land for years, says she cannot be barred from it by an entity that doesn’t own or lease the property. The City Heights CDC, meanwhile, has claimed it is “in good standing” with the city and has maintained that entering the property by individuals without a plot agreement will be treated as trespassing.

“They claim that there’s concerns with theft,” said Abdelrahman’s attorney Todd Cardiff, “and they’re trying to keep people out. The only people that they’re trying to keep out are farmers that question whether they have the authority to make them even sign a lease.”

The City Heights CDC’s challenge to the Hubner Building Company is an attempt to obtain ownership of the property through adverse possession – a legal process through which one can claim the title of a property by meeting certain stipulations. In California that means having continuous possession of the land for five years while paying all taxes assessed to the property.

There are competing answers to the question of when the nonprofit actually took control of the property. 

In her letter, City Attorney Elliott said the City Heights CDC took over management of the farm on January 1, 2020. An IRC spokesperson told inewsource the transfer date was early 2020. (Complicating matters, Elliott says the farm’s founder, the IRC, never signed an agreement that year to transfer management to the City Heights nonprofit.) 

The nonprofit’s own messaging has been inconsistent. In March 2020, the City Heights CDC posted on its website that its management of the farm was “just a few months old.” Then after the dispute with the farmers began, it posted that it took over the farm in 2019, without specifying when that year it gained possession. It says the same in its trespass lawsuit against Abdelrahman. 

However, in their lawsuit for adverse possession, the CDC says it has managed the land since December 2018, which would meet the five-year requirement for possession.

Cardiff says he has yet to see evidence showing that the City Heights CDC has had a legal relationship to the farm, let alone for five years.

Meanwhile, Abdelrahman and fellow members of San Diego New Roots, the nonprofit they formed earlier this year to seek a pathway to manage the farm themselves, say they have secured an appointment with City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera. Representatives from other City Heights nonprofits will join them. 

They plan to discuss ways San Diego New Roots could run the farm after receiving an email from Elliott who said even though the land isn’t currently zoned for farm use, the city council or the mayor could “explore rezoning” the land.

Cardiff said he sees legal pathways for the farmers to run the garden themselves.

“Especially the way the City Heights Community Development Corporation are acting currently,” Cardiff said, “the farmers want to exercise some self governance.”