No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Who Should Be Allowed to Live in Rural Areas?

Jan 2

2007

“Only those who need property for growing crops or keeping animals and livestock not allowed in urban areas should be allowed to build homes in rural areas,” writes a reader of the Oregon Statesman-Journal. Though the Census Bureau does not keep track of exurbanites, many demographers believe that exurbia is the fastest-growing part of America. Naturally, anti-sprawl forces want to stop this growth.

Back in 1995, Newsweek observed that, in Holland, “a businessman seeking to live on a farm and drive into the city to work would have to request permission from the government — and he might not get it.” The magazine suggested that the U.S. should have similar rules.

Oregon’s rules come close. Planners zoned 95 percent of the state as “rural” in the 1980s. In 1993, the state planning commission decreed that no one could build a home on their own rural land unless they owned at least 160 acres, actually farmed it, and earned (depending on land productivity) at least $40,000 to $80,000 farming it in two of the previous three years. This strict rule was needed, said the director of the planning agency, because “lawyers, doctors, and others not really farming were building houses in farm zones.” Horrors!

Such strict rules might be appropriate if we were really running out of farmland and if there the market was failing to prevent overdevelopment. But there is no shortage of farm or rural land in the United States — or, really, anywhere in the world. Census and U.S.D.A. data show that, by any measure, 95 percent or more of the U.S. is rural. Urbanization is “not considered a threat to the Nation’s food production overall,” adds the U.S.D.A. Even if there was a shortage, a scarcity of farm land would drive up land prices and make development unprofitable.

Planners respond that there may be lots of rural lands, but urbanization often threatens the most productive farmlands. The most productive lands in Oregon are in the Willamette Valley, which occupies one-seventh of the state but houses two-thirds of its residents. Will population growth and sprawl ruin those valuable farms?

A smart-growth group known as the Willamette Valley Livability Forum asked this question a few years ago. As I noted in Vanishing Auto update #10, they commissioned a study that found that urban areas now cover 5.9 percent of the valley and projected that, under Oregon’s strict planning rules, this would increase to 6.6 percent in the next fifty years. But if there were no planning rules and Oregon let “short-term market forces call the shots,” the study found, then urbanization would grow to cover 7.6 percent of the valley in fifty years.

So that means that all of Oregon’s costly planning rules are protecting just 1 percent of the state’s most productive farms and forests from development. Big deal. (The Livability Forum nonetheless managed to report the numbers in hysterical terms in a tabloid sent at taxpayer expense to nearly half a million Oregon homes in 2001.)

But isn’t there a problem with exurbanization fragmenting farms? It is difficult to see why when the average size farm in many European countries is less than one-sixth as large as the average American farm, while the average farm in Asia is less than 1 percent as large as American farms. Yet farmers in those countries manage to be pretty productive, at least when they have an economic incentive to be productive.

So why the panic over exurbanization? Urban residents who spend most of their time in cities or on rural interstates have no real conception of how much rural land the U.S. has. They get upset when they see a nearby farm developed. Planners who may or may not know better rely on such feelings to promote their own agenda, which is to encourage people to live in compact cities.

Why are planners so fascinated with compact cities? They claim to be scientific, but the truth is that cities are too complicated for anyone to plan. So planners rely on fads and simplifications. Compact cities are the current fad. But as Robert Bruegmann observed at the 2006 Preserving the American Dream conference, “there is nothing inherent about sprawl that is any more or less environmentally friendly than cities.”

Why should government planners get to dictate whether someone gets to build a house on their own land? Why should governments try to force people to live in compact cities? There are no good answers to these questions, but we do know that regulations aimed at “protecting” farms and open space have added hundreds of billions of dollars to the cost of housing in the U.S. — a cost far greater than any benefit gained from such rules.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner