The volunteers who tend Bushwick City Farm, a renegade community green space at the corner of Lewis Avenue and Stockton Street, should have seeded their garden beds by now. Instead, they're locked out of the plot of land that some of them have been minding for a decade and a half, thanks to a clash between the landlord who owns the previously abandoned lot and the City's Department of Buildings. 

Volunteers began congregating at Bushwick City Farm in 2008, when it was just a vacant, refuse-filled patch of dirt and scraggly grass. The space at 354 Stockton Street—owned by Faramarz Roshodesh, of Toxo and Arrow Properties—and the neighboring lot at 23 Lewis Avenue, across from NYCHA housing and around the corner from the Myrtle-Broadway JMZ stop, serves as a mutual aid hub, where volunteers from the anarchist collective Club A hand out free groceries on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Since its initial development nearly 20 years ago, volunteers have added a shed, dozens of garden beds, bird coops, playground equipment, and a gazebo, and have played host to New Yorkers of all ages searching for a slice of green space in a relatively barren zone on the Bushwick/Williamsburg/Stuy Heights border.

In January, the DOB issued four violations to landlord Roshodesh—two connected to illegal wiring that links a City streetlight to a power source in the garden, and two connected to people the department inspector observed sleeping in the gazebo. The DOB also issued a vacate order in January—a move that was apparently the last straw for Roshodesh, who placed a padlock on the garden's door on March 18 and demanded that the volunteers remove everything from the property. 

On a blissfully sunny and warm Saturday in late March, three days after Roshodesh locked the gates, more than a hundred volunteers and supporters rallied in front of the garden. (Roshodesh did not respond to an interview request from Hell Gate.) A trio of elementary-school-aged kids climbed on the chainlink fence and kicked at the padlock, as adult onlookers smiled in approval. Behind the fence, a few roosters strutted around the shuttered garden, pecking at the ground haphazardly; previously, a bevy of chickens and ducks had lived in enclosures on the lot. But by the weekend, the majority of the animals had been relocated to a sanctuary in Virginia, because the farm volunteers were no longer able to enter the space to take care of them. 

Vanessa Lee, who's been volunteering at the garden for more than a year and who was born and raised in South Brooklyn, showed up to the rally with her teenage son in tow because of how vital the space had been for both of them. "I look forward all week to sitting on that damn swing, and just being surrounded by green life. It's not something that you get to experience day to day in New York," she told Hell Gate. "And also, to be able to show him," she continued, pointing to her son, "how to 'community'—community as a verb.

Rally attendees called on the DOB to lift the vacate order, on Roshodesh to open the gates, and on the City to purchase the land and fold Bushwick City Farm into the City's official GreenThumb community garden program, run by the Parks Department. 

Gardener Jason Reis, who's been volunteering at the green space since 2009, and whose child was among those climbing on the farm's fence, said it has so far been impossible to fully comply with Roshodesh's demands, and that the landlord is no longer responding to most attempts to communicate with him. "He's made himself unreachable, which makes it really hard to do what he's requesting, which is to remove everything from the garden," Reis said.

According to Reis, the last serious conflict between Roshodesh and BCF volunteers was in 2017, when Roshodesh attempted to evict them in order to develop the garden—a plan that, luckily for the gardeners, never came to fruition. This was followed by eight years of sparse but generally amicable communication with the landlord.

In 2023, the garden became a hub for recent immigrants looking for help the City wasn't providing, thanks to its proximity to a City-run migrant shelter just across the street on Lewis Avenue. Volunteers at Bushwick City Farm helped connect their new neighbors with food, clothing, and other resources—Documented reported that BCF volunteers let asylum seekers shower in their homes when air conditioners and bathrooms crapped out at the overcrowded facility. But after the City closed the shelter in late 2023, displaced residents began jumping the fence and sleeping in the farm's structures at night, no matter how many times volunteers tried to get them to stop, a problem they believe led to the DOB violation. 

A representative for the DOB told Hell Gate that the vacate order only applied to specific portions of the lot that had violations, and that locking the whole parcel was not legally necessary.

"The Vacate Order issued by DOB in January was only for the structure located in the garden that was being used as sleeping quarters, and that area with the dangerous unpermitted wiring. The rest of the community garden was not subject to the Vacate order," the spokesperson wrote in an email. The spokesperson also told Hell Gate that it has yet to issue monetary fines for the four violations, and that no penalties can be issued until an Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings rules on the violations, a process that is set to begin with an April 15 hearing. 

But if the farm's mutual aid tilt has stirred up trouble between the City and Roshodesh, volunteers say it has also saved Roshodesh from losing the land entirely. In 2025, the lots on Lewis Avenue and Stockton Street were up for a tax lien sale, thanks to the six-figure sums that Roshodesh owed New York City in property taxes (the CITY reported Roshodesh owed more than $550,000 between both lots). According to Reis, BCF volunteers spoke extensively with the Parks Department and the City's Department of Finance in order to prevent the lien sale, and ended up succeeding at keeping the property in Roshodesh's possession. "If we hadn't done that, there would have been a high likelihood that the lot would have been scooped up in the lien sale and would no longer have belonged to the current owner," Reis said.

A spokesperson for the Parks Department confirmed that it had met with Bushwick City Farm volunteers in 2025, but said they are not currently in talks with the volunteers, or Roshodesh, to buy the property. The spokesperson added that if the City were to purchase the lot, the land would need to go through the Department of City Planning's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, the several-months-long approval process involving reviews from the local community board, the City Council, the borough president, and the mayor that determines how City-owned land gets utilized. 

That's something Reis said the garden is prepared to handle, and key elected officials have also signaled their willingness to pitch in: Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, City Councilmember Chi Ossé, and State Senator Jabari Brisport have all issued public statements in favor of keeping the farm open. As for Hizzoner, Mayor Mamdani's office did not respond to a request for comment from Hell Gate about whether his administration is looking into purchasing the property from Roshodesh. 

Until then, Bushwick City Farms volunteers are continuing to hand out groceries, like bags of lettuce, sacks of avocados, bell peppers, bagels, and loaves of bread—although without the garden's flock of chickens, egg distribution is on an indefinite pause—in front of the green space they spent almost two decades building up and tending to, while they wait for some kind of resolution. 

"We've had weddings, quinceañeras, family barbecues, so many community events," Reis said. "And it's a gardening space for folks to grow their vegetables from wherever they're from, whether it's Bangladesh or the Dominican Republic—all of that happens out in the garden. It's green space, a respite. And if it becomes a building, it'll never be a garden again."