$2M to Variety Farms for land preservation

MarkBNJ

Piney
Jun 17, 2007
1,875
73
Long Valley, NJ
www.markbetz.net
They've been doing this very aggressively up here in the NW corner as well. With the highlands act and a lot of local anti-growth zoning initiatives the environment for new home construction has changed quite a lot. As a homeowner with equity in an heavily anti-growth area, a misanthrope, and a lover of the outdoors I am all for it :). But I do wonder what the long term effects of this will be on the distribution of population and the role of the urban core in these regions. Fwiw, what got me off on this line of thought was the quote in the article about preventing the future development of 72 homes. Quite an attitude shift over the last two decades.

A data point or two: 55% of our 9.1m sq. kilometers is currently permanent pasture or woodland, another 19% is arable and under cultivation. 75% of the land has nobody living on it. Only a small portion of the remaining 25% is actually developed and inhabited. Population growth in 2007 is 0.8 percent.

So the issue must be that a lot of people want to live in the same places. It's like we want to pack in as densely as we can. The good news is that, given those numbers, the people who can't find any place to live in my town should be able to build somewhere else.
 
Top