My sense is that it was riding a wave of "local" and "farm to table".
If you're in a city like LA or NY where there's a lack of space AND local demand for a premium priced product that can be delivered year round AND more awareness/marketability for such products (local + sustainable), the economics are different than versus growing a commodity product in Boise, Idaho.
It's like the farmers in Asia that grow super premium fruits (Japan and Taiwan come to mind). It only makes sense in the context of a market that will pay the price premium.
All you’re saving by forcing that is a few hours of driving in a truck. If there’s an emissions concern then most farming regions are also good places for renewables like solar and wind. Electric or other carbon neutral vehicles seem like a more reasonable solution. Just a short trip outside of a city can probably get enough land for a large greenhouse if you want higher density farming with existing ag-tech and shorter transport.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I wouldn't make the case that it makes _zero_ sense; only that they couldn't prove the use case and find the right products and market. Definitely with a more high-value product that couldn't be sourced reasonably locally or even from the US, there may be a better economic case.
It reminds me of this couple growing yuzu lemon in NJ and selling 5-10x the price to Michelin restaurants in the area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwTc5929U5g
And generally speaking, I don’t want my food grown where it’s the most polluted. From the middle of nowhere with minimal population density, ideally upstream of any big city, is where I want my food coming from.
(Will admit I start a garden at my mom’s in a medium sized city’s suburb, but when I run some containers on my balcony on a busy city street, the layers of dust from ??? concern me)
Maybe this will get better once we don’t have the concentration of ICE vehicles in urban centres, but until then…
The economic case is vastly more sensible in Singapore or some other city-state.