The community garden as we know it has not come to be without growing pains. What were once vacant lots are now protected public spaces, but somewhere along this transition the community garden was a place of contention between public and private interests. The project inserts itself at this critical moment of limbo and assumes the worst case scenario; appeals are denied, voices are muffled by the cries of housing scarcity, and communal space now finds itself in the hands of development. The project asks, what can be done to reconcile the two - the garden and the home, the collective and the individual, the fence and the wall. By operating retroactively on a site that has experienced this tension, an alternative model for housing will be proposed, one that mediates the two entities and places them on equal grounds, both figuratively and physically. Sandwiched between two housing volumes, the courtyard functions as a locus, branching movement to publicly programmed spaces as well as moments of repose. Living and communing face inward, and like a handshake, the garden creates a vertical relationship between the life of what we grow and the spaces in which we, as people, grow.