How Values of Property Differ
Urban and Rural: Lifestyles Clash Over Differing Views of Open Space
By Guest Writer, 11-27-07
The urban and rural definitions of property and open space are colliding in the West. These differing definitions and lifestyles of rural and urban are fragmenting each other. Susan Duncan discusses if the current understanding between the urban and rural will allow both to maintain and to survive on the landscape of the West. -Editor’s note
Open space and planning issues have brought forth the differences between our rural land-based culture and our mobile urban opportunity-based culture. (As I describe these lifestyles, remember these are both extreme stereotypes. Many people are hybrids of the two, including me.)
In a land-based lifestyle, the land is the only asset. This asset requires enormous commitment and deep family and community bonds to hold it together. The farm/ranch is not only home, but a livelihood, the family’s 401K and the keeper of the family heritage. The family business requires its members be on call 24 hours and 7 days a week.
The assets in an opportunity-based urban lifestyle are more diversified. The family home is an expendable asset, to be sold whenever opportunity calls for another move. Livelihood is based in a separate office, store, or business unrelated to home. The 40lK follows the job. Family heritage is a photo album and some artifacts, all portable. Work is 40 hours and 5 days a week leaving time for recreation.
Because of the demands of a land-based lifestyle, recreation is combined with work. Family, friends, and neighbors come together to gather cows, brand, shear, vaccinate. These seasonal jobs grow into a traveling potluck. A get-away vacation is a trip to a convention or a livestock show in Billings or Denver to talk business or show stock, while grandparents or hired help hold the fort at home. Recreation is based at home within the family and community. Many farm families believe their farm is the most beautiful place in the world.
In an urban opportunity-based lifestyle, recreation occurs away from home – sports, hiking, rafting, skiing, hunting, or going out with friends. Always on the move, to this group recreation isn’t just play. It is serious business.
In a land-based lifestyle, family ties and community are one in the same. Since members of this group don’t move around much, their friends represent lifetime and multi-generational relationships. Local genealogy is the fabric of acceptance and credibility in small town and rural life. Gossip often begins as, “I heard Mary Gump got married last week.” (Blank stares all around.) “You know Mary, she’s Phyllis Winters’ daughter by her first marriage. They used to live on Dry Creek.” (Nods and smiles all around.)
One of my mail route patrons asked (sarcastically), “How long have you been doing this?” “Seventeen years,” I replied. After I told him I knew my predecessor, Bobbie and her predecessor, Les and the names of my farmer neighbors, everything was okay. He had placed me in the genealogical pantheon.
Participants in a land-based lifestyle expect to know the life history of everyone they meet on the street in town. They prefer to “trade” with businesses and people they know, like a local pharmacist rather than mail order or Costco, even if it costs more.
As the valley fills with new people who don’t share this lifestyle, the ties that bind the rural world together are fragmenting. Going to town means being caught up in the hustle bustle of strangers, rather than friends. They know and trust fewer shopkeepers. They feel more and more alienated in their own hometown.
None of this bothers opportunity-based urbanites. They have friends but if they move on they expect to make new friends. They don’t expect shopping to be a socially bonding experience. They don’t care if they know the clerks and the owners. They look for product and price.
For those in a land-based lifestyle, protecting property values is a matter of survival. Property values determine if they can keep their home and lifestyle, if they can get operating loans to farm, if they can protect their retirement assets for themselves and succeeding generations. They distrust government involvement in these issues. They trust market forces to make things come out right.
The home, livelihood, 401K,and family heritage of those in an urban opportunity-based lifestyle are not threatened as much by property values. The threats are in the cost of sprawl, in increased taxes for services, and degradation of the quality of life through loss of open space. They see government intervention as beneficial for the common good.
They propose solutions that cost them nothing but require sacrifices for land-based citizens. They resist putting a dollar value on the open space and wildlife habitat that farmers provide free. They resist paying a living wage to farmers for food. They demonstrate how little they know about the dynamics of agricultural business when they propose permanent conservation easements as the best way to save working farms as open space.
Would they voluntarily reduce the value of their collateral for business loans and their 401K, to save open space? Could their business survive if they froze it in time (as a quaint, museum piece) so it could not adjust to changing business conditions? That’s what they expect farmers to do by putting their land in conservation easements.
Both cultures recognize the value of land. Both care about the value of their own property. It IS about money, but NOT greed. If the farm is not economically viable, farmers lose their home, lifestyle, livelihood and fall into bankruptcy. Or, they can sell out to a developer to pay debts and cash out their 401K but lose their hope of passing on their heritage to future generations – a traumatic soul searching experience, either way.
The rural culture loses. The urban culture loses – open space, wildlife habitat, rural character, historical continuity. Sprawl continues. Taxes for services go up.
Nothing will save this from happening until both sides realize how interdependent they are and work together to resolve their differences in constructive ways.
[End of article]THANK YOU, SUSAN, for writing what is probably The Best article to yet appear on NewWest.net on this subject!
No problem can be adequately addressed, much less solved, without first defining it.
You have done a marvelous job of doing just exactly THAT!
Those of us who are hybrids to a greater or lesser degree understand your comments. I will hope others will understand the impact of them also. The greater our mutual understanding is the more successful our shared future throughout The West will be.
Your closing paragraph says it all!!!
THANKS!
Susan, I believe you accurately outlined the differences between urban and rural stereotypes about how our working lands function (views and environmental values versus vital economic compenents of a community). My experiences working on farms, working in cities, and working for county government have shown me the general truth to your thoughts.
However, I am confused about equating conservation easements (in which rural property owners receive compensation for reducing development rights) with either freezing a business in time or reducing the value of a 401(k). My experience with easements on working farms and ranches shows these eaesments provide a very valuable tool for farm and ranch owners to obtain equity from land while retaining the land and heritage that goes with the land. Well-designed easements allow farmers and ranchers to evolve with the ongoing evolution of agriculture and also protect the assets that urbanites deem important.
In Monterey County, where an organization made up of long-time community members and farmers has worked to permanently protect agricultural land for farming and ranching, the only people willing to sell conservation easements have been multigenerational farm families. They want to see this land continue to be successfully farmed and view conservation easements as the tool that allows them to do this. Urbanites and recent purchasers who buy this farmland view this farmland in investment terms primarily, not in cultural or agricultural terms. To them land is an opportunity and limiting government involvement in protecting the land for agriculture allows them to seek top potential dollar value, including speculative value, from the land. They do not view the highest and best use of the land being farming and ranching, so are equally willing to sell to a shopping development or to a home developer as to someone who will farm and ranch the land.
Maybe where you are writing from the situation is different.
Dear Michael:
There is a place for conservation easements but they are not a panecea for all of the conflicts between ag and urban in rapidly developing areas.(Gallatin Valley). Each land owner has to evaluate his options carefully, very carefully, or he can put his heirs in an untenable position.
If the land owner lives out in the "sticks" where he believes development will never reach him, he cannot know the future. If the land owner is already surrounded by development and knows the future, he can make a more informed choice. ( I understand that the Gallatin County Fairgrounds will apply for a conservation easement to protect it from commercial development. I think that is a wise decision based on knowing what the market forces are that affect that property.) In any case, I think landowners would be foolish to put ALL of their land in a conservation easement.
People tell me I should put my farm in a conservation easement and in some circles (Greater Yellowstone Coalition growth seminar) I have been viewed as an outsider/non believer/heretic for not putting it in a conservation easement. Truth is that this land was farmland when we developed it for farming. It will not be farmland in the future.
A planned interchange at Thorpe Road will put us on the edge of highway commercial. We have River Rock to the south, Landmark to the south east, Cobblestone to the south, and 100 acres south of us with a For Sale sign on it.
Our property has no riparian habitat. It has no significant wildlife habitat. The Fish and Game and NRCS have refused to fund pond development where the ditch deadends at the Interstate. To get funding we have to open our land to hunting. Seventy six acres is too small to provide more than temporary seasonal habitat and it is too near housing to allow hunting. Those were their reasons for denying cost sharing. This property would not qualify for a conservation easement. There are no significant "public" values to be preserved.
Because of the soil (shallow, very well drained, Gallatin River alluvium), it is not prime agricultural land. It must be irrigated to produce a crop. Irrigation makes it look lush and green. The expense of irrigation is overwhelming - $700 to fill up the propane tank on the pump and that lasts 7-10 days, (estimated $3500 a year) plus $200 a month electricity to water 10 acres from a well. Further subdivision to the south may make it impossible for us to maintain 2 1/4 miles of ditch (if no one else is farming to share the costs) to get our irrigation water from the West Gallatin even if they are senior water rights dating from 1872 and 1888.
Despite a 30 year investment in this place, I have to accept that it is a one generation farm.
Good job, Susan.
Very sophisticated and nuanced look at the R/U divide. From what you write in your comment, a conservation easement on your ground would be economic suicide. With the ditch issue and the cost of any remaining neighbor parcels, the fact is, there comes a point where a farm is not viable as a farm at that location, no matter the desire. With the encumbrance of a CE, you'd not have the money to buy a viable operation.
I wish CE law had never been written. It is wrong, especially when you consider that CE's are usually wrapped up in inheritance/generational transfer issues.
A better thing would be for the nonprofits to organize sinking trusts that literally pay to farm from generation to generation until such point that ag operations are no longer viable.
Good luck.
Thank you for your concise investigation into the backgrounds that form a lot of the controversy over landuse in this valley. What do you think are some happy mediums between the two? If conservation easements are one tool, what are some others? How do we merge the urban and the land-based, without creating a nebulous sprawl of suburban landscapes, which, in the end, don't help or satisfy either population?
Comment By Wildman, 12-06-07Enjoyed the article. In the last sentence you say we need to work together to resolve our differences in constructive ways. The question is in what ways? What positive steps can society take to encourage farmers and ranchers to stay in business? What positive steps can society take to encourage substantive land use planning and environmentally friendly development? We know there are problems, what are the solutions?
Comment By Rose Mary, 12-06-07Perhaps we all need to look deeper and beyond the simplicity of urban vs. rural, complicated as that issue is and as much as those differences need to be understood by all concerned.
Although I do believe that everything Susan has mentioned is true, the fact remains that within a very short period of time those rural farm/ranch properties will be owned by another generation that will primarily be members of the mobile urban opportunity-based culture as Susan has described it to be. This seems to be abundantly clear when one stops to consider how few descendants of the land-based culture have been financially able to remain on the land and continue the historic use of it during their adult lives.
This is, of course, reflected in the average age today of farmers and ranchers.
In 1978, the United States had 350,000 farmers that were 34 years of age or younger. The USDA 2002 Census of Agriculture revealed, about 70,000 people 34 years of age or younger listing their primary occupation as farming. Less than one percent of America’s farmers are under 25 years of age, while nearly one-third are 65 or older.
The fastest growing age cohort of farmers and ranchers are those 70 or older; the fastest declining is those 25 and younger.
Therefore, it seems to me that issues involving the use of rural land is fast becoming very personal to a younger generation who left the rural areas years ago and are now very real participants in the urban opportunity-based lifestyle.
The fact that most are not likely to personally continue farm/ranch operations on this land will not change their basic need to protect property values is a matter of survival. Property values will also determine for them whether or not they can keep their homes and lifestyles and if they can protect their own retirement assets for themselves and succeeding generations even though that home, livelihood, and 401K have been long ago transplanted into an urban opportunity-based lifestyle.
As Susan has said, both cultures recognize the value of land and both care about the value of their own property.
I think the words "value of their own property" are important ones to remember. It is always much easier for those who do not own the land to speak of uses for it that do not offer the highest return.
In my own not-so-humble opinion that is a human frailty and we are all subject to it. It would be much easier for me to decide to "gift" your prized valuable possessions to others or "for the common good" than my own. And, it is always much more difficult for any individual person to be willing to forfeit their own property rights than it is for them to demand that forfeiture from others.
However, unless we are all going to link arms to promote a socialistic society, even more so than that now existing in our Nation, we must factor into any solution we strive to obtain the retention of private property rights ~ those rights that NO other Nation provides. If we allow our short-term goals to destroy those private property rights we will have sacrificed too much and those high dues will be paid by future generations of both urban and rural citizens.
... or so it seems to me ...