Buffalo News Article by Michelle Kearns
Urban Roots garden center is latest co-op founded in city
Idea germinated from news article
By Michelle Kearns, News Business Reporter
Updated: 05/15/07 6:30 AM
Charles Lewis/Buffalo News
Members of the board of the new Urban Roots garden co-operative are, from left, Carolyn Gullo, Harvey Garrett, Monique Watts, Blair Woods, Anthony Armstrong and Kristen Smith-Armstrong.
The idea for the Urban Roots garden center, a new Buffalo co-operative business that has been selling out of petunias and mulch, came to Blair Woods one piece at a time, like the flower gardens he insisted on planting in his neighbors’ yards.
The venture began with a tidbit he read a few years ago in a newspaper story about how city gardeners tip each other off when there are good gardening sales in the suburbs. “I said, ‘I think we should have a garden center on the West Side,’ ” he said. “Why are we driving one hour each way to buy plants?”
Urban Roots, which opened at 428 Rhode Island St. in April in a neighborhood where boarded up houses are near well-tended homes with flower beds, is a mix of thoughtful business planning and community- building ideals.
“Among me, and a lot of my friends, I’d much rather spend my money in the city,” said Woods, 43.
Charles Lewis/Buffalo News
Anthony Armstrong, president of the Urban Roots garden co-operative, holds a flat of flowers ready for planting.
Mother’s Day weekend turned out to be a big, gratifying success, the culmination of about three years of work and a $200,000 investment with loans, the $100 contributions of 175 members and the purchase of the store building with apartments and a side lot for $95,000.
“We had to make four trips to our suppliers to pick up more stuff, in three days,” said Woods, of the gerbera daisies and topsoil they kept needing more of. “We always thought we had a solid plan and we always thought that it was needed.”
The new co-op store has a neat, garden-savvy, urban look. The woodrail fenced yard has a patio made of salvaged bricks and things a gardener might need: tall $200 cherry and $170 birch trees ready for planting, red dahlias on trays for $6, and 40- pound bags of topsoil for about $4. Rakes and hoes, from $15 and up, leaned against a clapboard side wall.
Woods, who manages rock bands for a living, thinks gardens can change neighborhoods, which is why he developed the plan for the co-op at about the same time that he realized there were five boarded up houses on his block of Rhode Island. To stop the decay, he planted hostas and lilies in the yards around his house and wrote out his garden store idea in an e-mail.
He forwarded it to about 50 people on a list for a network of neighborhood groups he is a member of called the West Side Community Collaborative. The idea collected its collaborators as his e-mail note went from person to person until a copy finally wound up in Wood’s wife’s work e-mail box.
By the fall of 2004, there were about a dozen people meeting monthly at a neighborhood church. Their plans for a garden co-op grew.
To write a business plan and gauge prospective sales, they surveyed about 300 people out walking in the Elmwood Avenue district last summer and found people spend routinely on their gardens: from $200 to $2,000 a year. Another market study found only 3 percent of the demand for gardening supplies in the Western part of the city was being met in the city.
Finally in February, the group began signing up members for $100 a share. Their $20,000 is part of the money being used to buy supplies of mulch, cherry trees, hedge clippers, compost bins now for sale in the fenced-in yard and small store. To finance the rest and buy the building, the group collected another $40,000 in member loans and $140,000 with a mortgage and bank and community development loans.
The National Co-operative Business Association claims there are about 21,000 cooperative businesses nationwide with 155 million members, about half the U.S. population.
As a basic model, it was famously used for food co-ops in the 1970s when people wanted bulk and organic foods they couldn’t find in regular stores. Elmwood Avenue’s Lexington Co-op started then and continues now with that same focus. Its success was an inspiration to the Urban Roots founders who consulted with the grocery in their planning.
“There are new ones opening every month,” said Art Jaeger, communications director for the NCBA based in Washington, D.C. “They form co-ops when the marketplace isn’t serving them.”
Co-op varieties include credit unions, which account for 9,000 of the 21,000 estimate. Other categories factored in are utility co-ops founded by rural communities to buy electric and phone service. The Ace and True Value hardware store chains are also co-ops owned by independent hardware stores.
Gardening centers seem to be a unique, but perhaps emerging, sub-category. Last October the Urban Earth garden center and florist opened in a neighborhood south of downtown Minneapolis. When a greenhouse and store for a long-time neighborhood florist stood empty, the neighbors organized. “We were afraid of losing the business,” said Mary Ann Knox, a founder and one of the 150 members who paid $95 to buy a share.
Her neighborhood of Victorian houses of the kind featured on garden tours has responded so well to the new co-op that the business has been running on its revenues. So far it hasn’t needed any loans beyond the member-contribution start-up cash of $15,000. “We’re crazy busy,” said Knox.
The founders of Urban Roots hope to draw the same, consistent crowds from Buffalo’s gardeners even though the store’s neighborhood is different. Residents have low and moderate incomes and a side street had a nickname of “Crack Alley.” But the new co-op garden center is a few blocks in from Richmond Avenue, the western border of the tonier Elmwood Avenue “village” district.
“The fact is, the purchasing power in a dense community is really extraordinary,” said Anthony Armstrong, a board member and program officer for the community development nonprofit Local Initiative Supportive Corporation.
While some Urban Roots prices are higher than those at big-box garden centers, Woods and Armstrong say the co-op will add value and draw customers because it is conveniently located, has plants from local growers and will hold occasional classes with gardening tips, such as how to save seeds for future planting and build a brick patio.
The store is open to anyone, but members will be eligible for special discounts, such as packages of four unusual, orange and mottled “heirloom” tomato seedlings that can be ordered for $6 instead of the regular $7.50. Any eventual profits will be shared.
“I think you will make your money back many times over. In dividends, when the business starts to make money,” said Woods. “You’re buying a share of stock in a company.”
The good sales of the past weekend seemed to bode well. It was particularly fun, he said, to see boys on bikes making one trip after another to buy $1.99 six-packs of petunias to give for Mother’s Day. “When I left on Saturday, we were all just ecstatic,” he said.
