Daron Babcock, who runs the largest urban farm in the United States, was born in Amarillo, Texas but first encountered Bonton, a poor and deprived area in Dallas, when he was living in San Francisco and working at a high-powered job. It was not somewhere you might ever have expected to find him.

Danny George, now the manager of Bonton Farms, was raised in Bonton and remembers when people from the Rhoads Terrace housing project would take potshots across the street at the officers’ wives when they’d come by the police station with lunch. “Growing up in Bonton was like growing up in Afghanistan or Pakistan,” he says. “People were shot and killed daily. My mother would cover me with her body when the shooting would start.”

It was a place without hope – and in fact, Dallas once tried to change its name in hopes that would change the neighborhood dynamics. And, as Babcock says, lack of hope is a dangerous thing.

But hope is what he has brought to Bonton since he moved there in 2011, having sold his house in San Francisco and quit his job. And hope, as he notes, is contagious.