Barbara Palermo looked at her lawn with disdain in the summer of 2008.

“Why are we wasting all this time and money on something that doesn’t feed us,” she asked her husband and herself.

So the West Salem resident tore up her lawn, put in two large vegetable gardens and made plans to add a structural addition to a small greenhouse: a chicken coop.

The legal road block Palermo hit was an ambiguous one – it confuses her still. The current city land use ordinance contains a section outlawing hoofed livestock and allowing pot-bellied pigs, but doesn’t mention chickens, which increasingly occupy a grey-area between domestic pets and livestock.

“I don’t need a permit or a license or even a brain to get a vicious pit bull, but I can’t get a chicken,” Palermo said.

An animal health technician who has studied chickens as part of her professional work, Palermo launched the Salem group C.I.T.Y., Chickens in the Yard, in September 2008. She gave herself the handle “Salem Underground” and posted a message into the Internet ether.

“I am a city girl. I had never been around chickens before I started working with them,” Palermo said.

What she discovered was group of people eager to help her fight for change to the city code. Within days, thirty people had joined the online group and were mobilizing to address the issue.

It wasn’t the first time the urban chicken issue had come up in Salem. In 2006, a group of like-minded chicken enthusiasts asked the City to explore the possibility of loosening regulations to allow chickens within city limits – and within certain guidelines.

But nothing changed until late February, when a group of about 75 people presented a package of research, news clippings and letters of support to Salem City Council during the council’s public comment period. The 60-page package represented over six months of comparative research, on the effects of chickens on the environment, real estate prices, and code enforcement in cities that already allow them as domestic pets.

The chicken-lovers included letters of support and reference from Portland’s Office of Public Safety, an OSU Extension poultry expert, and from Willamette University’s director of sustainable communities, Joe Bowersox, among others.

No issue since 2001 has incited as much response from residents as urban chickens – and many people are against it.

“Almost everyone has expressed concerns,” councilor Diana Dickey said of the opinions she has fielded from her constituents in the past few weeks. “The proponents of urban chicken keeping have done an excellent job in their research,” she said, adding that the council is committed to finding a workable solution that won’t be a financial burden to the city.

Concerned neighbors fear the birds would get loose, create more noise or odors, draw rats and other predators, or attract barking dogs.

At a session on March 9, Salem City Council decided not to vote on whether to take up the issue, but to pass it along to Marion County officials to see what part the county might play in enforcing a new code.

National urban chicken movement finding its wings

Salem is already somewhat late to the urban chicken dance. Across the country, from New York City to Denver, citizen groups have pushed through legislation to change local laws to legalize chicken keeping in urban areas. Already, Eugene and Portland have witnessed their urban chicken movements take flight, allowing homeowners to keep three without a permit. In Corvallis, homeowners can keep as many chickens as they want.

Still, the past year has provided an almost perfect storm to make urban chickens relevant in Salem. Chicken-keeping may have started as an almost twee outgrowth of the locavore movement – where people try to eat more food produced within their immediate surroundings – but interest in it has reached critical mass since the economic downturn. Would-be chicken keepers argue that the birds increase emergency preparedness during times of economic hardship while reducing peoples’ carbon footprint and teaching children about where food comes from.

“People don’t want to just say it,” Palermo said about the locavore movement. “They want to live it.”

It’s not just the locavores who stand to gain from a change to the code, according to the group’s supporters.

“We see great hope in educating low-income community members about how to raise a few backyard hens to improve their nutrition and increase self-sufficiency,” Ron Hays, president of Marion Polk Food Share, said.

The chicken itself — and its incredible, edible egg – has an almost mythical place in the times that try men’s souls. During the Great Depression, the Republican Party promised “a chicken in every pot” at a time when few people could afford such luxury, and chroniclers of that era often cite the chicken egg as a luxury that was savored like none other.

“We put to good use that ultrathin membrane that lines the inside of the eggshell,” wrote Mildred Armstrong Kalish, author of the New York Times best-selling memoir Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.

But some argue that backyard chickens require more money than they are worth and won’t help combat hunger.

“Eggs are cheap,” said City Councilor Bob Cannon, who is for allowing chickens, but opposes the current amendment proposal. “When you think about how much it takes to build the coop and feed the chicken, those eggs are golden.”

The changing face of the chicken

Salem’s chicken wrangling has highlighted a paradigm shift in how Americans view the mostly flightless fowl. In fact, today’s urban chickens are more a pampered pet than livestock. Chicken keepers post online pictures of their coops – often filigreed, cutesy condos and cottages.

For foodies, keeping chickens is a matter of taste. They say organic eggs, which cost as much as four times more than industrially-produced ones, just taste better.

“I value pastured eggs over factory farmed,” said David Rosales, owner and chef of Salem’s La Capitale Brasserie, who notes that pastured eggs can be bought easily in the Salem community from local farmers. “Chickens that spend their days eating bugs, grass and weeds produce a better-tasting egg as well as an egg lower in cholesterol and with higher nutritional content.”

In Portland, chicken keeping has become a viable thread in the city’s fabric, with groups hosting an annual Tour de Coops of quaint backyard chicken condos to de-mythologize the bird and to show how simple raising them domestically can be.

That’s not enough for detractors to the movement, who worry that a change to the code in Salem would be a code-enforcement nightmare.

For Salem’s urban chicken keepers, it is impossible to tell which came first: the love of chickens or the need for eggs.

Still, if passed, the proposed amendment to the land use ordinance would legalize owning as many as three hens (not roosters, which are male). Selling, breeding, or raising chickens for meat would be prohibited. Chickens would have to be kept in an enclosure at all times and owners would have to prevent access by rodents or other pests. Coops would be kept at least 25 feet from any residential structure on adjacent properties.

“The range of maintenance will be extreme,” Councilor Cannon said.

Members of the Salem group, meanwhile, have a way to go before they can chill with their peeps. But the group seems eager to challenge the deep stereotypes that exist about chickens, an image sometimes pejoratively associated with rural life.

“When we say chickens, our critics are picturing some 1952 movie with kids in dirty coveralls, with chickens and roosters running around and cars rusting in the front yard,” Palermo said. “I used to think that too.”