A daunting task. Urbanization in central California is gobbling up the most productive farm land. Sprawl created by an unwillingness to control or manage our population growth.
Even in the heart of this still rural, conservative, farm country the faint hint of population management would be considered heresy. It is simply the God given, constitutional right of every American to plunk a house on two and a half acres and raise lawn.
The imposition of growth boundries by even a simple remedy of minimum parcel size is quickly circumvented by the corruption associated with housing development at the local, political level.
In central California incentives to hasten the increase in the number of farming operations is mute because the suburbanites are consuming the land.
A daunting task. Urbanization in central California is gobbling up the most productive farm land. Sprawl created by an unwillingness to control or manage our population growth. Not so. Sprawl is created by cheap land. Cheap land is created by depreciating the value of alternative uses, such as agriculture and forestry. That is largely done with regulatory costs. Environmentalists have become witless participants in an enormous real estate scam.
Yep. If we try to pass legislation to protect farmland around here, we end up getting it from three sides.
- First you get the developers and construction industries whining about diminishing their livelyhoods. Too many people have become dependent on continued sprawl and curtailing it would hurt the economy.
- Next you get it from the planners. If we build less houses, the value of the existing ones increases. This has the effect of pricing poorer people out of the home market and traps them in apartments.
- Finally, you get it from the farmers themselves. Too many farmers in this region plan their retirements based on the developers going rates. They know they can make far more by selling their land to a developer than to another farmer, and so they do just that. When we try to pass these farmland protection bills they scream about us "infringing on their property rights" and destroying thier financial future.
So what's the solution? I dunno. I regard property rights to be among the most inviolate an American holds, but as I watch hectare after hectare of some of our nations best farmland disappear under endless rows of tract homes, I can't help but think we're shooting ourselves in the foot.