Why is it that I have a huge cramp in the pit of my stomach when I hear about our president-elect’s stimulous plan of building roads, schools, bridges, etc. I see even more bulldozers on the horizon. Why does the political machine hammer about about climat change but don’t try to preserve our first line of defense - our forrests and trees?
Can anyone calm my nerves on this one?
He probably was referring to overhauling the urban infrastructure, much of which is crumbling. Look at DC for example. It’s a shit hole and they need a few billion in financial aid to set things right. Spending gobs of money and time building up things in areas where nobody really lives would not generate any real stimulation to the economy.
I agree with Lex. I live in PA and we have some really dilapidated roads and bridges. The State can’t afford to fix them all as quickly as it needs to be done so an influx of Federal money would bring jobs as well fix some problems. In a perfect world, the projects will be fast tracked. I hope the bridges, at least, in the suburbs and rural areas are going to get attention - some of them are 100 years old and are scary!
Fact is… many 100 year old bridges are in far better shape than those built in the 60’s! They built those old ones to last; they built in the 60’s to tear down 30 years later.
Obama is going to concentrate on repair of the 1950’s infrastructure, not new building. He’s talking with Meet the Press right now and just reiterated it will be rebuilding and improving existing roads, bridges, schools, etc.
It is the developers that buy up the land and rape it with a gut of overpriced, oversized, shoddy housing. Those are the guys that need to be shot!
Thank you. But remember that the developer could not build anything if he didn’t have three elements working in his favor:
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Your next-farm neighbor who has had the property in his family for 250 years, and now can no longer afford to keep it due to high taxes, and can’t find anyone to buy it for farm purposes.
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The people who really need to be shot: the idiots on local planning commissions who give approval for large developments and alter ag zoning to accommodate it. Often they are in the pocket of the developers. If they are at least trying to be honest, they often delude themselves that more construction will result in more property taxes inbound to the local exchequer. This, of course, is untrue. More construction of houses will mean more need for schools, roads, police and fire protection, libraries, health care facilities, etc. etc. and all the other et ceteras that will actually require more public expenditure and a need for yet higher property taxes.
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The New Bucolics who buy houses on a few acres in the country because they read “Country Living” magazine and thought it would be great for the kids to see a lambing or whatever. But they’re not really country people and aren’t used to dealing with things on their own, so they want a supermarket (preferably Harris-Teeter), a Blockbuster, a dry cleaner, and all the other conveniences of suburban life brought in. Witness Aldie, VA and the Rt 15 corridor.
Sorry for the rant. I just hate to see my beautiful countryside eaten up by vinyl siding and Jiffy-Lubes.
Local Planning = No Money for Lawyers
Thanks - I hope that it is the URBAN infrastructure that is refurbished.
As for local planning commisions, they don’t have the money that large developers have who challenge exsisiting codes. If it is zoned agricultural, they sue to change it.
In times of massive layoffs, people looking at complete loss of income, and a complete depression on the horizon, I personally welcome the idea of projects that generate jobs for our country. Sure they need to be thoughtful of not completely wiping out our virgin Farmlands and Open space, but not all construction or building projects do this.
Some of us in the development world… (I am a landscape architect and enviromental planner for example) do understand that raping the land is not beneficial to anyone. It has led us to the path we are on right now. Too many houses that won’t sell, too many mortgages that aren’t being paid. People need to get smarter about the type of building that we do. Redeveloping urban areas is the way I think things are going to go now for the most part. Helping those that need help, getting back to work… not just making more subdivisions that people can’t afford, hate to look at, and use up a lot of tax payer money on maintaining and supporting with schools, roads, etc…
It’s going to be complicated for sure, but I think with as liberal as Obama is at heart… they are not going to just allow open season on farms and open space for development. He’s a smart guy, with a good idea for the environment. I think the roads and civil projects will be to revamp our existing roads and bridges … to generate jobs and repair our aging infrastructure… so more bridges don’t fail like the one that fell in Minnesota last year.
Just my 2 cents here…
[QUOTE=Ashby;3709466]
Thank you. But remember that the developer could not build anything if he didn’t have three elements working in his favor:
-
Your next-farm neighbor who has had the property in his family for 250 years, and now can no longer afford to keep it due to high taxes, and can’t find anyone to buy it for farm purposes.
-
The people who really need to be shot: the idiots on local planning commissions who give approval for large developments and alter ag zoning to accommodate it. Often they are in the pocket of the developers. If they are at least trying to be honest, they often delude themselves that more construction will result in more property taxes inbound to the local exchequer. This, of course, is untrue. More construction of houses will mean more need for schools, roads, police and fire protection, libraries, health care facilities, etc. etc. and all the other et ceteras that will actually require more public expenditure and a need for yet higher property taxes.
-
The New Bucolics who buy houses on a few acres in the country because they read “Country Living” magazine and thought it would be great for the kids to see a lambing or whatever. But they’re not really country people and aren’t used to dealing with things on their own, so they want a supermarket (preferably Harris-Teeter), a Blockbuster, a dry cleaner, and all the other conveniences of suburban life brought in. Witness Aldie, VA and the Rt 15 corridor.
Sorry for the rant. I just hate to see my beautiful countryside eaten up by vinyl siding and Jiffy-Lubes.[/QUOTE]
Good Rant! I watched the original Pickering Hunt territory get swallowed up just that way. I hunted with them as a kid and have fond memories of leaving from the original Club on Creek Road in Schuylkill Twp. Now the land is all filled up with McMansions and I don’t even know where the Hunt is based anymore.
Good Rant! I watched the original Pickering Hunt territory get swallowed up just that way. I hunted with them as a kid and have fond memories of leaving from the original Club on Creek Road in Schuylkill Twp. Now the land is all filled up with McMansions and I don’t even know where the Hunt is based anymore.
Same here. The hunt country where I rode and learned as a child and young woman is gone now, buried beneath the most amazingly ugly McMansions, each on useless two-acre lots. The land where my ancestors hunted in Virginia three centuries ago is retreating beneath the onslaught of townhouses. The townhouses, though originally bought with bright hope by optimistic people, shortly turn into places where the cops must visit frequently.
Now, lest I sound like a complete snob and rich-bitch, let me hasten to add that I’m neither. I am simply someone who sees that building major developments out in the sticks is not a successful strategy for meeting our housing needs. When people go shopping for real estate, they think it’s nice to see the horsies grazing in a nearby field, but they don’t realize that soon the nice horsies will be gone, to be replaced by a building full of empty, unleased offices. The brief sight of someone else’s horses or cows does not compensate them for the two-hour one-way drive through impacted traffic to the nearest job they can find. Few people are satisfied with this arrangement.
Similarly, few people who buy the McMansions really, really want a rural lifestyle. They don’t want to deal with a long drive to buy a gallon of milk, don’t want to farm, panic about rumors concerning coyotes or cougars, dislike using a well and septic system, and want the conveniences of suburbia brought to them.
In both cases, people who are comfortable or poor are buying in the country because they think they can get more house for the money, and buying int he comfortable suburbs is too costly. I must agree with LaGringa, that urban and suburban redevelopment is the way to go to meet housing needs, lower the costs of close-in living, and save our environment from ceaseless sprawl.
Now if only we can persuade local planning boards of this! For it seems that no matter how loudly rural people yell their displeasure, we are ignored and derided. The developer’s cash payment and misinformation campaigns argue for more construction.
A lot of these McMansions are the two and three family homes of the future. They’re a blight on the landscape, and a monument to the excesses of the past decade.
[QUOTE=Ashby;3709466]
- Your next-farm neighbor who has had the property in his family for 250 years, and now can no longer afford to keep it due to high taxes, and can’t find anyone to buy it for farm purposes.[/QUOTE]
You forgot the children/spouses that inherit the land and just want to sell it to the highest bidder. One farm that I boarded my horse at for a while, the people gave up their lease on the 40 acre farm because they kept getting stonewalled when they tried to buy it and they took it from an overgrown mess to a serviceable place. The person that inherited it just wanted money - some of her family members wanted to keep it as a farm, but in the end she won out and housing is scheduled to go up there.
Another woman married a man about 20 yrs her senior and is disappointed to find out that he made a deal with the local government, which including gaining some money on his part, and the 100 acres bordering Fair Hill Park can only be sold as agriculture, so she cannot get the money she wants from it.
It isn’t all about ‘farmers not being able to afford’. Sometimes even people with farming type backgrounds are greedy also.
I think calling farmer’s greedy in this context is a bit much.
Farmer’s make thier own paycheck and it’s not an easy job…
Perhaps thier kid’s don’t want to farm… they don’t like the idea of working 7 days a week… the risk… the hard work…
Perhaps the farm was like a self managed 401 k plan?
Let’s not bash farmer’s to-day… 
I think that if he’s talking schools, the equation changes. Bridges, roads, etc. are one thing (though where he’s getting the money?) but when people start talking about overhauling aging schools, they almost always quickly up the ante and start talking about new schools. Because who wants to run for re-election after saying “Our kids don’t deserve a brand new school”? And new schools are often built on previously undeveloped land because of population shifts, land pollution, etc.
A return to appreciating a vibrant agricultural sector in society for not only aesthetics but also as a form of homeland security will happen. China might provide all the crap folks buy at Wal-Mart but we cannot import food the way we do oil without our days being numbered.
One has to think logically that in the future there will be at the Federal level a highly strategic value placed on open productive lands for sources of food and grazing. As well as tree-dense lands for the reduction of carbon dioxide gasses and cooling temperatures. (Sure some of that occurs now but at best it’s a patchwork of organization largely private non governmental.)
A concerted effort to bring food sources closer to the dense urban areas. Increasing costs in transportation will necessitate having beef closer to the northeast then transporting it from Wyoming. Fuel, like it or not, will return to $3 and above as supplies are depleted or we switch to alternative fuel sources.
Where am I going with this? Well for decades so many small farms in Upstate NY, for example, have ceased. The diary operations closed down and the property left to rot. That unproductive waste of land resources will change and I do think a very urgent movement will come to pass to get back into farming to feed the masses and stabilize prices.
The almost criminal allowance of past small town governments allowing fertile agricultural lands to be paved over for parking lots or a crappy McMansion erected on them over.
Does that mean a return of mom and pop farming? No. It was never as efficient as it had been sold in the almost romantic ways in the media past. Corporate farms? Perhaps. More likely it will be driven by hybrid partnerships formed with lands banked together into one single umbrella farm organization but managed in multiple pieces like divisions of a company. So you may have a 20,000 acre farm – and rural lands to hunt on, et al – in Pennsylvania formed and operated by a dozen different farmers, each have partnership stakes with profit sharing and voting rights.
My guess is that a significant amount of “lost” farm land regardless if it is been covered by homes if its still deemed strategic for farming, then it will be bought up and returned to that original purpose. All at an amazing cost of course to us the tax payers.
Glimmerglass, I 'd like to think that you’re right about recovering lost farmland. I’m not sure that this could ever happen, though. It would be extremely difficult to persuade local planning boards that bulldozing a row of run-down townhouses would contribute more to the local tax base than a farm that might replace them. Historically farms have received (and need) huge tax breaks. Residential units of course pay far more in taxes per unit land area (though not enough to cover their actual cost to the locality, of course), and office or industrial space pays far, far more.
One of the issues driving the loss of rural land is that as our population grows, there is increasing pressure for people to leave the crowding, noise, and crime of urban and suburban areas. You don’t mind putting up with a certain amount of noise and perhaps a certain level of crime, too, when you’re 23 and on your own in the exciting city for the first time, and don’t want to spend a long time commuting. But when you have kids, you want to move out to the distant 'burbs or the country and recapture the American dream. You want that quarter-acre lot in a safe neighborhood, and good schools for the kids. These things are generally not obtainable in or near the city unless you’re rich, so as families grow, more and more residents move further and further out to find affordable housing.
So unless we address the dreadful social pathologies that have wrecked our cities–a vast project that goes to some basic political debates in this country–the pressure on our rural lands will continue and intensify.
chicken & egg problems
our suburban communities were hunted as late as the early 1950s. first came the commuter highway known then as the red bird express [now I64 and undergoing a major overhaul]
forcing the hunt west to the adjacent county and in nov 2005 devepement again forced the hunt one county further [north]. about 1 hr from my door all but 10 mi on devided federal hwy.
our little suburban community http://www.town-and-country.org/ annexed [1971] area for revenue and control, pissed away a lot of money on 3 parks in the name of preservation [we are also boardered by a 600 acre county park] http://www.qpee.org/docs/home.html and now must court retail for revenue. [and we told em so] but the city web page calls it “transitioning” from farm to large lot residential. the last cows went about 10 years ago.
Large lot residential is what killed Loudoun County in Virginia. Developers will tout it as development that pays for itself but it doesn’t. Our taxes tripled in Loudoun County before we moved out.
You know what I’m finding interesting in those large lot residentials ? The unexpected appearance of nice board fencing, small barns, and 1-2 horses grazing where only a year or so ago was nothing but lawn expanse.
Outside town limits I have notice a LOT of 5-7 acre residences being turned into cute personal “manageable acre” horse farms – well within the scope of working couples or single owners. Many just can’t afford the pricy and hard to find 10-25 acres in this county – especially since we are now back to a 50 acre rule. However, they can easily have their horses at home on those 3-7acre places that sprouted in those development nightmares. Way to reclaim the rape of the land back into something worth while.
This is Loudoun, after all. Horse country. Hunt County 
Can’t breath the air without having a sudden overwhelming desire to have a horse, or chase a fox.
across the street and up the block
the 40 acre hay field started sprouting 1- acre Mc Mansions from the $1,400,000.
sales are a might slow right now but still about half full.
the six acres across the road and down the block are in the county and were striped bare in preparation for 1/4 acre zoning lots. but nothing is being built and the woods, farm house and horse barn are gone. I expect it to be ugly. at least the park is horse friendly [so far]
it takes 5 acres for a city permit to build a private horse stable [enumerated conditional use]
with one acre tear-downs at $350K+ it is cheaper to move further out and that is the problem.
[QUOTE=Elghund2;3719993]
Large lot residential is what killed Loudoun County in Virginia. Developers will tout it as development that pays for itself but it doesn’t. Our taxes tripled in Loudoun County before we moved out.[/QUOTE]
What happened to Loudoun was a travesty.
