This land is my land ... peasants keep out
I used to live in a wealthy, fashionable university town abutting the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Just before I moved away, the community voted on a greenbelt proposal which would in effect stop development around the city limits using the guise of environmentalism. That was many years ago but the practice is thriving today.
In many elite areas around the country, very little building is going on because of housing bans and the passage of local open-space laws. These examples of exclusionary law serve to isolate those inside select jurisdictions while prohibiting outsiders from moving in. Unfortunately, a side effect of this folly is that the poor, lower-middle-class families with children, and disadvantaged minorities who already live there are forced out because they cannot afford escalating housing prices and rental rates. This causes the disintegration of distinct neighborhoods, adds to overburdened thoroughfares due to forced commuting, and fosters the separation of families.
Open-space laws are wrong
According to Dr. Thomas Sowell, much of this agenda is directed by people who inherited great wealth and use the trumpet call of environmental protection to augment their own property values, inflate egos, and control who moves in to their neighborhoods. Here in Little Martin, Florida's wealthiest county per capita, exclusion is not a result of selective laws that punish a segment of the population. Rather, it is a question of its very small land area and limited remaining open land within the urban services boundary.
Growth was strictly governed by a progressive comprehensive land use plan initiated in the 1970s when Little Martin was mostly natural habitat and farms, and our neighbor counties to the south had not yet built themselves into sprawl from the Atlantic Ocean to the Everglades. Even so, the median home price in Little Martin increased by a staggering 39 percent from just last year, to $235,000. Short of global depression, these prices will only continue to rise (with an occasional dip every so often) because of the dearth of available housing.
I am committed to and support free enterprise but selective open-space laws voted in as perks to augment wealth while harming others are just plain wrong. T.S. Eliot said it best when he offered this half a century ago: "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."