Political Discussions
Land Rationing
Posted by jeremyjanson • 7/23/09 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: ecoterrorism, pro & con, Seattle, washington state
In WA, there is a little line on the map a certain distance from Seattle where nearly all development must cease. A few areas, older towns like Fall City and Snoqualmie are grandfathered in, but otherwise only agriculture and some light industry is tolerated.
A few of the positives of this rationing are obvious: it preserves a lot of natural land and supports local farmers, though it also makes it nearly impossible for those same local farmers to sell their land if they wish.
Some of the negatives are also obvious: you are artifically constraining the growth of the city, driving up land prices and making industrial growth much more difficult. This is especially stifling in WA, where excess rail capacity and cheap electric power create a potential industrial dynamo, now reined in by environmental regulation.
You can also argue it hurts the country as a whole by preventing one of America's greatest potential industrial centers from expanding.
User Comments
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More Government. Ugh. A wise man once said, "Every time Congress meets, you lose more of your liberties."-
Personally, I can see the logic in protecting natural wonders and wilderness land, but farmland should be fair game. I mean, farming's just another industrial activity, there's nothing particularly pristine or wild or beautiful about it.
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Well, for a farmer at harvest time them beans and corn might be lookin' awful purty!
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Actually in this case it would probably be King County government. As far as stifling WA, there are places like Moses Lake and the Tri-Cities area that could use the industrialization as well. -
@Agit8r: No, it's actually at the state level, but the boundary is from a certain point west of the mountains to the mountains. Trouble with Moses Lake, et cetera is they don't have the freight capacity Seattle has.
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there is also the brownfields/urban decay areas of in seattle, tacoma, everett and olympia that could easily be developed.
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WA & even more so King County and Seattle have wacky regulations though, so some of those areas can't be developed for the things, like industry, that they would be very suitable for. Also, some of those brownsfields are actually Sea-Tac Airport property that the county has been holding hostage for years.
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do you think that seattle has the necessary transportation infrastructure to become more populous?
I know those of us on this side of the state are sick of paying gas taxes for y'all -
@Agit8r: Actually, it would cost less then allowing Seattle to grow skywards. Think about it this way: If Seattle grows upwards, you have to tear down buildings and build tunnels, elevated highways, subways, and other scary expensive stuff like that to expand transportation by the teeniest proportion. By comparison, if you expand in to Carnation, Duvall, et cetera, you have large areas of cheap, free of construction land that can be quickly turned in to surface freeway at a low-price. The only trade-off is the enivronmental hazards.
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Well, speaking from an area that has seen the damages of uncontrolled industrialization and "progress" in the last 10+ years - I would say be thankful that you have some protections from it.
From constructing in marshes and wetlands, to taking entire neighborhoods and demolishing them, to the commercial take over of residential properties (thus squeezing the real estate market) to the pollution of our waterways (as well as wells) and air, I'm not seeing what's so great about it.
Our real estate and cost of living expenses artificially skyrocketed (and we are experiencing the backlash of that in earnest now) and our jobs did not increase in number or pay.
Enjoy your preserved areas.-
"Our real estate and cost of living expenses artificially skyrocketed..."
Increasing supply lowers price. Anywho, allowing the sale of farmland and taxing it would actually help protect real wilderness by allowing us a real estate fund to buy up sensitive lands and turn them in to wilderness. -
Yeah...that looks good on paper, but it's not how it works in real life.
Once the industries moved in, everyone saw an opportunity to make a quick buck, further that the executive employees brought in by the company went about and bought up almost half of the real estate, jacked up rents, and started flipping houses which artificially inflated the market. (This was over 10 years ago).
Rural areas were developed into big box shopping plazas, they destroyed the wildlife put local business owners out of business, paid too little in comparison to what they charged - and most of them have also gone out of business. Leaving giant unused buildings where woods once stood, a lot of people unemployed, and local businesses crushed.
It simply does not work the way you think it does, and you should be thankful that this kind of blatant destruction of communities is not allowed where you live.
My community is living proof of the kind of depressed area and havoc it creates. -
King County's rents are actually some of the most jacked up in the country. (After CA, NY and maybe NJ) Also, strictly speaking I'm an out-of-state student at Georgia Tech, so I've seen much lower costing living areas in Atlanta where the market was much freer. Bottom line is, humans do make mistakes and construction markets aren't perfect. Also, I'm only talking farmland, wilderness land would still be protected.
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I'm not sure how high King County's rents are - but in metro New England CT, MA, and NY the rents are excrutiatingly high (Particularly in comparison to the average real pay).
All are highly industrialized areas, all of them have extremely inflated costs of living. Average rent here: $1200 per month. Average wage: $10 per hour. You do the math
In Boston the average rent is upwards of $2000 per month or more. Of course, the pay grade is slightly higher than here.
In '96-'99 here the average wage was $10 per hour, but the average rent was $600 per month. We were teeming with local businesses, restaurants, and urban neighborhoods as well as woods and forests. In came a couple of massive corporations - they took over entire neighborhoods - clear cut forests, famr lands and generally consumed everything in their path.
That opened the door to even more corporations to come in and do the same. ANd everything though Awesome! More jobs! More money! it'll lower costs!
Wrong! true to stereotypes each and every individual corporation that moved in consumed what they could, took everything they could, and after sucking the area dry - left. Otherwise known as the "chew and screw". Or the Wham bam thank you ma'am.
We now have housing complexes (AKA "condos") sitting on prime, beautiful, PUBLIC property - empty and derelict because the prices were so out of control no one can afford to live in them. And they're building even more! They're clear cutting all of the wetlands and woods around my inlaws to put in apartment complexes! No one wants it, no one can afford it, and no one's gonna live in it!
What an utter waste. We now have approximately 50 ft of public beach for the entire city to use - the other miles and miles of coastline have been completely privatized. It's disgusting. -
"In came a couple of massive corporations - they took over entire neighborhoods - clear cut forests, famr lands and generally consumed everything in their path.
That opened the door to even more corporations to come in and do the same. ANd everything though Awesome! More jobs! More money! it'll lower costs!"
no. Both are the result of government planners handing out welfare to fictitious persons.
that wouldn't have been between 2003 and 2007 would it? when this guy was in office:
news.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?articleid=1186070 -
It was pre-2003 and it was local level politics that allowed it. (However it should be said that these corporations had enough power and money to force their way into it, which is pretty much what they did).
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Fighting sprawl and protecting the environment = land rationing?
More like "land rationing" = an abuse of the English language.
And someone forgot to ration me some land. I could use it. Rent's getting damned expensive. [/sarcasm]-
Random House Dictionary, circa 2009:
"to ration (Definition 6): to restrict the consumption of (a commodity, food, etc.): to ration meat during war."
You lose. -
Shucks. Not even if I cite Oxford?
"ration (noun): a fixed amount of a commodity officially allowed to each person during a time of shortage, as in wartime : 1918 saw the bread ration reduced on two occasions."
"ration (verb): allow each person to have only a fixed amount of (a particular comodity)."
Or try 2b of ration as a transitive verb at Merriam-Webster: "to distribute equitably".
Still not convinced? Neither is my landlord. Not of my right to have a "fair share" of space for nothing anyway. The meaning of "to ration" on the other hand, is another matter. -
@MS: The Oxford Dictionary says nothing about the Random House. And anyways, as this form of rationing is already used in health care, negative rationing, something tells me I'm not the only person not following the Oxford Dictionary.
EDITED: But what's the point? Everybody knows what I'm talking about and I did it succinctly. What other language is there?
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Another SanSan or BosWash you don't want. The thing about agricultural land is that it takes decades or even hundreds of years of tilling to become good. Unfortunately it does not take long for it to go bad through erosion, contamination etc. It is worth bearing in mind that good agricultural land is of strategic interest to any country.
Developers prefer green field sites because they are cheaper to build on. Developers need to be encouraged to use existing derelict land (brown field) otherwise you get urban areas spreading, like a virus eating out into green fields, with activity only at the edge, thus leaving an ever expanding derelict and run down core.
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"The thing about agricultural land is that it takes decades or even hundreds of years of tilling to become good."
What exactly does that mean? Please explain and point to some credible source. I was born and raised in the Midwest, and for you to make a claim like that is, well.... Just please explain how you mean that? I understand the part about not taking soil long to "go bad." A litany of reasons could be responsible for just such an event. -
Do you think that rich soil on the banks of the Mississippi just happened? Or think about countries with bad conditions. What kinds of difficulties do they encounter in making land productive? Part of that is water, to be sure, but there's also the soil.
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We have a massive overabundance of agricultural land in WA. There are vast stretches of unused farmland east of the mountains that would never be reached by urban sprawl because of the difficulty of crossing the Cascades during the winter. (Though we have a very long tunnel for freight trains.) Further, it's not like you actually need that much agricultural land to expand in to. A few hundred acres, barely enough for a modern farm, can go a long way when you're talking industrial development.
@MS: Interestingly enough, soils that are underexposed to water and must be irrigated are often the most nutritious because all the various nutrients build up in them over centuries without being washed away. In particular, a lot of the desert in Southern California became among America's most productive farmlands when first exposed to water. -
Agriculural land is like gold dust. When all other industries have become history agriculture remains. Polybore may not be born and raised in the midwest. However polybore does have the blood and toil of several hundred years of their ancestors toil, working the land of the Highlands of Scotland, in their veins.
Should anticsrocks wish to provide information to the contrary, to polybore's previous comment, polybore would be interested to see it. -
Doesn't change the fact that farms are going out of business because no one will buy their crops at prices that would turn a profit.
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We have the same stuff here. It's good because there is preservation and conservation. It's also good because they can't afford the services that come with more building - schools, libraries and so forth. There is something a little disturbing going on here though, in that the power of the county allows for them to downgrade ( meaning in value) land from residential or R2 to agricultural, meaning if someone bought property which was R2 they paid a hefty price, changing the zoning to agricultural decreases the value significantly.-
"they can't afford the services that come with more building - schools, libraries and so forth."
Actually that would pay for itself. Increased tax revenue. I understand your point, but at the same time I do not see the point in preserving agricultural land. Preserving wilderness land, absolutely, but farming land is not natural in any meaningful sense of the word. -
"Actually that would pay for itself. Increased tax revenue."
seems like I wrote a thread about this...
www.blogcatalog.com/politics/discuss/entry/how-republicans-raise-your-taxes -
I remember it. But see, not all of that is property taxes - some of it is also sales tax revenue going up not because any particular customer is being charged more, but because there are more customers. And the property taxes follow roughly the same principle: more revenue out of the land, more tax collected.
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sort of a redistribution of wealth... subsidy begetting increased taxes, begetting more subsidy o_0
this is better than liberal statism how exactly? -
(Edited Slightly) It's just standard government investment. You have to be careful with government investment, because there are definitely a lot of things that will not generate this level of positive externality, but infrastructure really does generate that much societal good.
It's not Statism precisely because the State really isn't controlling that much - they're just playing a clever accounting game. The books are all that get touched. No rationing, no utopian visions, no real human goal, just a little game with numbers.
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I notice that one of the tags is "ecoterrorism." Could you explain that?
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I sometimes call WA the "Small Ecoterrorist Republic of Extremely Obstinate People."
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why?
what ecoterrorism has occurred here? -
It doesn't get reported in the newspapers. They're too clever.
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it seems that ecoterrorism involves massive property damage and/or endangerment of human lives... or do you define it otherwise?
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They have a little gnome army that they're using to invade Idaho.
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