"Green Community" is Changing the U.S. Landscape

As the reality of climate change is felt across the globe with warmer weather, rising sea levels, and stronger weather disturbances, many communities in the U.S. are working together to create a “green community.”

The desire to create a green community is more evident in the City of Chicago as many residents there spend their free time tending their “global gardens.”

Like Jenny McMillan. While some residents of Chicago are busy with their urban pursuits, like watching movies, riding around in cars or eating in their favorite restaurants, McMillan can be seen busy tending her vegetable garden that she grows in her backyard using brown soil from her neighborhood in Albany Park.

The 45-year-old stay-at-home mother of two is a member of a local community and part of a much larger growing back-to-nature trend that is catching up in most U.S. cities.

McMillan, who calls herself an urban gardener, is proud of produce. “They are fresh, have better quality that most of the vegetables sold in supermarkets and they are more affordable. And if anybody asks me where do I get my vegetables, I often tell them that they come straight from the seeds in the kitchen,” McMillan said.

But McMillan is not alone in her urban gardening. A community group called Global Garden, located at Lawrence and Sacramento avenues, in the 2900 block of West Lawrence Avenue, is a growing organization with over 3600 community gardeners.

Global Garden prides itself as being organic and pesticide-free garden. It is funded by non-profit organization Peterson Garden Project, which operates eight community gardens in Chicago from as far north as Howard St. and Ashland Ave., and as far south as the Field Museum.

The community gardening trend is growing across the U.S. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the White House, and First Lady Michelle Obama are all big advocates of community gardening.  The White House even has its own kitchen garden that is tended by the First Lady herself, White House staff and even visitors of the First Couple.

Elsewhere in the U.S., legislators in the City of Pomona, in the San Gabriel Valley, Southern California, have approved an ordinance extending the moratorium on the establishment and expansion of recycling and waste-related activities for 10 months and 15 days.

The Pomona City Council gave a preliminary approval of the proposed bill on July 28 and is expected to approve the ordinance on Monday. In June, the council adopted a 45-day interim urgency ordinance for the moratorium.

Damiana Aldana, a member of the board of directors of Clean and Green Pomona who is also community outreach chairwoman of the Associated Pomona Teachers, commented, “It is very appropriate that the task force consists mainly of Pomona residents who go to school, and work and play here in Pomona.”

Last week, Aldana welcomed the decision of the city council to create a committee comprised of a majority of Pomona residents.

Indeed the global community must all work together to create a green community to mitigate the effects of global warming and learn to produce what we eat.

One helpful tool real estate agents and home buyers could use when choosing a property is RealBiz Media Group’s RBIZ Video Microsite Program. The web site allows brokers to have automatically created property videos from data listings and photos and from there you can determine if a property is capable of supporting an urban garden or if the community has already caught on with the trend.

But more popular is RealBiz’s virtual tour program that is developed through HTML5 and optimized for mobile devices. Agents enrolled in the program can have unlimited virtual tours created that allow clients to have an interactive tour of a property. It allows customers to see and explore and accurate representation of the house of building through interactive video.

RealBiz Media reported that since it rolled out its Nestbuilder Agent and MVA video platform, it has received 15,000 active users and published 24,000 videos.

Its consumer site Nestbuilder.com, which hosts 1.6 million videos, has also had 51 percent increase in return visitors and 196 percent increase in page views.

Because of the effectiveness of videos and the ease of use of the programs, RealBiz now has a client base of 350,000 real estate agents.