Replies

That's exactly what I meant way back on this thread when I pointed out that "private property rights" are easy to define when people live on 160 acres of land in rural areas, but they are not so easy to define in a nation of 280 million people. The more people you have in this country, the more opportunities you have for inherent conflicts about private property rights.

If we could all live on the banks of a river in West Virginia, then this wouldn't really be an issue. But we don't.

I actually agree with a lot of what you say about the relationship between local government and property. But I live in Piscataway and my property is probably less than 500 feet from part of the farm in question and I frankly question whether the purpose is really open spaces or to eventually "ooops" let the property be developed. The first thing you need to realize is that they recently put a huge shopping center right across the street from the farm. Interested in open spaces? Ha! To top that off, the developers building on the same side of the street as the farm started ripping up trees adjacent to the farm before they had all of their permits. One recent editorial likened Piscataway's mayor to Ahab, going after the Moby Dick farm. My greatest personal fear in this whole thing is that in only a few years, I'll look out my back window and see either (A) another huge shopping center or (B) a high density housing project.

As for the Halpers, it's important to note how integral the farm is to the local area. People use it for horseback riding. Hiking? Yeah, right. The farm is in the middle of busy streets and hardly easy to get to on foot for most Piscataway residents. That area isn't designed for walking or biking. You'd be taking your life into your hands to do so.

The Halpers' reason for rejecting the farm preservation offer was that it was so restrictive that they wouldn't be able to repurpose parts of their farm even for other farming purposes, should the farm's economic change. From what I understand, they simply wanted to exempt part of the property to keep future options open. All of this wouldn't be a problem if Piscataway would stop their ticking clock of condemnation and simply try to find a satisfactory compromise with the Halpers that (A) keeps the farm a farm, (B) justly compensates the Halpers for the loss of the development value of the property, and (C) allows the Halpers some flexibility to repurpose parts of the farm for other farming uses. I get the impression from what I've read in the local papers that Piscataway is the problem, not the Halpers.

See Incorrigible's post a few up from this one. The big danger here is in transferring the open spaces land from the farm (which is in a prime location) to some worthless land elsewhere in Piscataway, only to develop the farm the same way the surrounding land has been developed (the Walmart megaplex across from the farm wasn't there less than a decade ago). I've lived in this area for much of the last decade-and-a-half (Rutgers Piscataway, Highland Park, South Edison, now Piscataway near the farm) and I see no evidence that the real purpose here is the preservation of open spaces at all.