As the harvest starts to come in here in Manitoba and conversations with my farming friends point to a good yield, I’ve been thinking about how to preserve these lands. Rural communities are often the ones with the greatest constraints, especially when it comes to finances. Without federal support, holistic zoning reform in agrarian places is rare. This, coupled with perverse incentives in lending practices, leaves some of the most valuable assets in North America – highly productive farm lands – with the least resources available for land use reform to protect them.
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July 26, 2017 | 2:46 pm
Land Use: Preserving the rural landscape with agrarian urbanism
January 7, 2013 | 12:01 am
Rural Preservation: One more reason to care about cities
We talk a lot on PlaceShakers about urbanism, but less about one of our big drivers: rural preservation. Compact development patterns could have dramatically decreased the 41 million acres of rural land that the US lost to development from 1982 to 2007. That’s almost the size of the State of Washington.
Clearly, we can’t keep up this pace and expect to have enough productive cropland, pasture, and range to serve our growing population. From 1982 to 2007, US population grew by 30% while development land increased 57%. Eating up land at almost twice the population growth obviously has an unhappy ending.
