Apr 7, 2007

Are Cities Condemning Land, Creating Urban Sprawl?

The Supreme Court decided rightly in the eminent domain case Kelo vs. City of New London.

The court ruled that the city could use its power of eminent domain to carry out a planned redevelopment of part of the city, even though private developers carried it out and profited by it.

The American Farm Bureau has been particularly agitated as a result and is leading the charge to have state legislatures make the use of condemnation power illegal. Ohio has done that. Several other states, including Michigan, already have limits in place.

But is this activity really about a threat to farms and farmers? If so, what, precisely, is that threat?

Farm Bureau argues that cities might use the power to seize farmland and convert it to non-farm uses.

I did an Internet search and could find no case where that has ever happened. There are many cases where cities used their power to obtain clear title to abandoned or blighted properties so that redevelopment could take place. In a recent issue, Farm Journal cited a case where the University of Illinois threatened to condemn a farmer’s 40-acre field to use it for expansion, but that was the only case the magazine cited. In another odd case, a California city apparently considered condemning a ranch to confiscate its water rights.

Overall, however, believe the danger to farmland comes in an altogether different form.

In the New London, Conn., situation, the city was attempting to improve conditions in the urban core. That, it would seem, would create jobs and better living conditions inside the city and lessen the incentive for residents to flee to the suburbs. That is a real threat – to both cities and farms.

Is the “threat” that better urban conditions might reduce the development value of outlying farmland?

Many farmers will tell you, frankly, their land is their retirement package, but how it gets cashed in has long-term consequences for the farming industry and for society. That should be a logical concern for a farm organization – which should oppose farmland conversion and support the continuation of farms.

One way to save farmland is to assure that cities can develop and redevelop land within the city limits and remove the incentive to abandon “brownfields.”

One thing should be clear: Nobody ever has complete control of land. You can buy an island and live on it by yourself, but you can’t make it a separate country.

Countries, not individuals, have sovereignty over land. How much control individuals have is defined by traditions. In the United States, we have more freedom to use land without restriction than citizens of most countries.

In the final analysis, all the land belongs to all the people collectively. To maintain sovereignty, they work collectively as a nation to defend property rights against outside forces. They develop internal rules governing the rights of individuals to use land, balanced by the interests of communities. Planning and zoning are tools communities use to shape themselves, and eminent domain is a tool they have to assure individual landowners can’t veto the overall community plan.

Across the United States, urban expansion is more often driven by land speculators and developers than it is by cities using orderly planning and zoning and exercising eminent domain authority. There is no evidence that cities collude with non-farmer speculators and developers to capture rising farmland values and bilk farmers out of them.

We should consider that we are all involved in the process of building a future for people who will come after us. People in the future, our kids and grandkids included, will need food and fiber, whether they farm themselves or not, and preserving farmland should be a primary consideration of any society that intends to remain viable. Farmers and their organizations need to speak to the issue of the deliberate, ongoing trashing of productive farmland.

We need to encourage cities to develop efficiently and compactly, not to sprawl. It is usually not city policy to sprawl, nor is eminent domain broadly used to create sprawl. Cities suffer when their residents flee for greener pastures, and farming suffers when farmers sell them the land to do it.