PolicyLink has created a new report, entitled Growing Urban Agriculture: Equitable Strategies and Policies for Improving Access to Healthy Food and Revitalizing Communities.
I would encourage you to look through the entirety of the report, which outlines challenges and solutions for urban agriculture in the United States, but one statistic jumped out to me:
“Only 5.3 percent of gardens in 38 cities [are] permanently owned” (presumably by the gardeners themselves or an entity designed to protect the garden). (page 23 of the report)
The survey cited for this statistic can be found here. This survey of community gardens was done in 1996, so it’s possible that this statistic of land-secure gardens has improved since then.
The concept of land security or land tenure arises in many of the blog posts on this site because it’s both (1) vitally important (see: South Central Urban Farm) and (2) sometimes very difficult to achieve.
If you live in Baltimore City and would like to achieve land security for your urban garden, please contact Baltimore Green Space, which is a land trust for community managed open space.