From the November 2003 issue of Resource Roundup…

Urban Sprawl

by Angie Many

   While visiting my family in Alabama last summer, I met an orthopedic surgeon, a friend of my sister’s. We got to talking about logging, farming, and the problems with radical preservationists, and I found that he agreed with me -- about everything except urban sprawl. He lives outside Montgomery, near the rural area where I grew up. Like many of the best places, it is now filling with ‘city slickers’, those who move out of towns to have an acre or two to call their own. Once they move there, they find that they don’t really like the sounds or smells of cows, and they want the roads paved, and they want to make other changes that change the very character of the area. The doctor deplores the changes, and wishes that there was a way to keep people from moving in. He believes that the preservationists are on the right track when they push for an end to ‘urban sprawl.’

   I, too, deplore the changes that ‘outsiders’ are making to our rural areas and I dislike seeing houses spring up where there was field or forest before. Like the doctor, I don’t like neighbors. I liked it better when I knew everyone at the local cafe. But putting restrictions on land to forbid human habitation and trying to keep people in cities is not only not the answer, it’s wrong. It violates the principles of private property upon which this country was founded. People should be able to build on their property, or sell it for development, unless such development causes specific and tangible harm to surrounding properties. Private property rights should be sacrosanct (with exceptions such as covenants imposed by the seller of the property and accepted before purchase by the buyer).

   Those of us who live in rural areas may deplore the fact that others are moving in, but urban sprawl is not an environmental problem and should not be treated as such. Efforts to exclude those people, through zoning measures such as requirements that each house have 25-acre lots, are wrong. Do we have the right to deny others that ‘American Dream’ of a little land to call their own?

   Some of the newcomers may actually prefer city living, but they no longer feel comfortable in their preferred milieu. They’re often leaving cities because of high crime rates, deteriorating schools, and traffic problems. Can you blame them? To slow influxes into rural areas, we need to start working to improve conditions in our cities.

   We also need to look at the reasons that rural people are selling their lands to strangers. Generally, farmers and ranchers try hard to hold on to their lands. They try to pass them down to their children, to keep them in the family. In today’s natural resource economy, however, that is very difficult. With the increasing amount of foods, timber, and other products that we buy from foreign countries instead of from U.S. producers, and with the plethora of employment and environmental regulations imposed on our producers, making a living on the land is very difficult now. Farmers and ranchers are often forced to subdivide. Loggers and miners -- who often come from families who lived in the same place for generations -- have had to sell their homes. People on fixed incomes must sell because they can’t afford the increasing property taxes occasioned by burgeoning government entities and rising land prices.

   As traditional rural people are forced to leave their homes or subdivide, ‘outsiders’ have the opportunity to move in. We have permitted, too often through our inaction, the very circumstances that allow others -- with values different from those of our rural communities -- to move in. Do we have the right to tell them that they can’t? Of course not. One alternative, unfortunately not available to most of us, is to buy the lands surrounding us. If that’s beyond our abilities, about the best that we can do is to try to ‘community-ize’ those moving in -- to associate with them so that we have the opportunity to educate them about our rural values and explain the farming, ranching, logging, etc. processes that created the area that they immediately loved.

   We can and should try to reverse the conditions that lead to rural people having to leave their homes or subdivide their lands, and the conditions that make our cities undesirable as residential areas. But if we value our property rights, we must respect the property rights of others.

What if it Were Your Land?

   There is an insidious -- and growing -- movement that is depriving people of their property rights and their properties. And too often, people are ignoring it because it’s happening to someone else.

   Local governments are increasing efforts to confiscate lands, not because a public highway is necessary but because they want more tax revenues. Alabaster, Alabama is an example. A developer wants to build a shopping center, including a Wal-Mart, but a few landowners don’t want to sell. No problem. The city agreed to use the power of eminent domain to take the land -- and sell it to the developer.

   Eminent domain is supposed to be used only to acquire land for the public good and only as a last resort. In convoluted logic, Alabaster politicians claim that they can’t collect enough taxes to pay for their government. Instead of looking for ways to reduce government services or costs, they want more tax money, which sales taxes collected at the shopping mall will provide. Therefore, building a shopping center, according to this ‘logic’, is a ‘public use’.

   Maybe you don’t know or care about those property owners in Alabaster. Maybe you can rationalize the confiscation if the owners are poor, or their places along the highway are referred to as ‘eyesores’. But if it can happen to them, it could happen to you. Suppose your local government was approached by a developer who said that he could increase tax revenue by building a 30-unit upscale condo development where your home now sits? Suppose you didn’t want to sell, and eminent domain was invoked. Would you be outraged then? Will you wait to do something until it’s too late -- until it’s your land that they want?  

   Alabaster Councilman Tommy Ryals stated that “Sometimes the good of the many has to outweigh the greed of the few.” Wanting to keep your home is greedy? Does that sound like Hillary Clinton?: “We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.” Our society was founded on the rights of the individual -- not on the good of the collective. Either we protect individual rights, or we relinquish our properties to the government and admit that we prefer to be a collectivist -- socialist -- society.

   If Alabaster was an isolated case, we could pass it off. Unfortunately, it’s not. At www.castlecoalition, other seizures are noted. In New York City, the government seized a block of small businesses -- to be used for the New York Times. Jacksonville Beach, Florida is set to seize properties to turn over to developers who will develop it ‘better’ than current owners have. The New London, Connecticut government condemned an entire neighborhood so that developers could build an office park. Riviera Beach, Florida, has approved the condemnation of property and dislocation of 5,000 residents for a private commercial and industrial development. A government agency collected a $56,500 bounty for condemning land in East St. Louis, Illinois to give to a racetrack for parking. Land was seized to replace a less-expensive car dealership with a BMW dealership in Merriam, Kansas. The homes of elderly homeowners in Mississippi were taken so that land could be transferred to Nissan for a manufacturing plant -- and the land taken was not necessary to the project. Las Vegas took the building of an elderly widow for casino parking in Las Vegas. New Cassel, New York, denied building permits to a church and then condemned the property and sold it for retail business. After 83 homes were condemned for a new Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, the plant ended up employing less than half the number of people in figures used to persuade the town. The list goes on and on.

   It all boils down to confiscation. If you don’t raise your voice in opposition, by the time they get to your land, there may be no one left to raise his voice for you.