Buried deep in the comments on Jim Bacon’s 25 January 2007 posting on Housing in Charlottesville-Albemarle is a 27 January posting by Anon 7:58. He / She makes a good point concerning the uses some owners of small parcels (10 to 50 acres) make of their land in the Countryside.
He / she does not state the case but also makes a strong argument for the fair and equitable allocation of all location-variable costs. Consider:
If a retired couple raises horses, rare livestock, dogs, heritage fruit and vegetables (Anon’s list – or if they raise, mushrooms, emus, wine grapes or anything else) for a living that is one circumstance.
If the wife is the spokes person for a phone company in Tysons Corner, the husband supervisors janitors in a highschool in Winchester and the kids log 20 person miles a day on a school bus and 30 hours a week in day care, and the couple raises (whatever) as a hobby, that is a different case.
Or is it?
If both couples pay the full cost of their location decisions it does not matter what the circumstances are.
The problem is that now the urban household that is also a hobby farmer is highly subsidized. Subsides come via government action at all levels, by utility suppliers who apply flat fees and by goods and service users who pay a higher cost for the necessities of a contemporary life because of the cost of serving scattered urban land uses. What else happens on the land does not lower the cost of the location-dependent goods and services necessary to support an urban lifestyle.
Citizens in a democracy with a market economy cannot afford a “Welfare State” that supports “Cadillac Welfare Queens.”
Those same citizens cannot afford to support the costs of dysfunctional human settlement patterns. A typical bundle of urban lifestyle-supporting goods and services cost 10 times as much as the same services cost in a functional settlement pattern. (The Cost of Services Curve and the 10 X Rule.)
In addition, while some enjoy the spacial disaggregation (and really enjoy the subsidy), the market documents that the vast majority prefer the same house in a functional location. (The 10 Person Rule.)
Some who want to keep the reality of human settlement pattern relationships confusing suggest that settlement patterns relationships developed by S/PI are too generalized. As we note in “The Shape of the Future,” the same could be said for accounting for the actions of gas molecules via Boyles Law and other relationships found in natural systems.
The Anon poster was concerned about regulations preventing the non-urban land uses from being carried out and prohibitions against land subdivision of land to create small parcels. He / She would be happy to see to availability of land for such uses increase (and the cost go down) when the use of land for scattered urban land uses are no longer subsidized.
Those who now, or hope in the future to profit, from the current subsidies and the settlement patterns that the subsidies engender wail about property “rights” without taking into account the community “responsibilities” that come with 21st Century urban life.
EMR