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Threads and Nodes's avatar

The local housing crisis is MY housing crisis. I have a place to lay my head at night, but it's not my home. I have funds to buy a home, but not in this market. I stay because of proximity to my grandkids. As a result I have been observing the intersection of a number of issues: climate change, climate resilience, water use, housing, growth management laws. The most egregious offenders in thinking on these issues are the so-called environmentalists who have organizations with national memberships and the lawyers who serve them. They've never watched an eagle playing in the wind. They have no idea what conditions are required to bring the spring peepers up to sing. They haven't put up a 6' fence to keep the deer out of the garden. Perhaps they should be sued for insisting on the conditions that have caused so much of our forests to burn.

One-crop farms tend to deplete soil. They don't have to. But regenerative farming requires getting grazing animals onto the soil periodically to re-inoculate the soil with the bacteria and fungi required to get that soil to hold water. Hydrogeology is not my topic, but I'm watching with joy and wonder at the results that the thinking of Allen Savory and Dan Dagget have been achieving in every continent except Antarctica.

It's expensive to get into farming. Big corporations have the money. Most of the rest of the farmers out there have inherited the farm, and they love doing it or they would stop.

About half of the land locally zoned 'agriculture' is not being actively farmed. They may mow hay once or twice per year to keep their 'ag' status. Many of those farms don't have a water right to do anything else. Land just sitting is not land that actively regenerates soil. Any farmer will tell you that you cannot have enough dirt.

Growth management laws in most states tend to jam people into steel and concrete. Cities are an ecological disaster! Not one of those towers will last as long as a cedar tree, or contribute as much to the environment. The sewage disposal problem is reaching a crisis in many places, where equipment is aging, or flooding just chooses another way to get rid of the sewage.

Growth management laws that allow development in rural areas tend to require homes to be compacted into a tight space. The consequences of that we have seen in the recent LA fires.

Locally we have about as many acres zoned 'R5' to 'R40', meaning that the minimum acreage on those parcels must be 5 to 40 acres before a home can be built. It was a move meant to 'preserve the rural character' and 'preserve areas for farming', but what it's done is made it impossible for anyone to move to a space big enough to grow a garden. Those 5 to 40 acre parcels aren't enough to competitively farm much of anything. They might be hobby farms, but...

... the folks living on those parcels, 5 - 40 acres, bought them 40 years ago. The families have grown up, and now there's just 2 people living there. Maybe not enough to manage a hobby farm, especially given their age. When they go up for sale they are generally sold to folks with enough money to buy them outright. They live there only part of the year, and don't plan to keep much of a garden.

I think, and this is what I need to see debated, one answer is to open up those parcels to subdivision, and allow young families a chance to get their hands dirty. A third of an acre is enough to grow a garden and have a shop or she-shed. A third of an acre is much easier to maintain than 5 acres or 40 acres, and small contributions to the overall health of the soil is much better than none at all.

People are not a scourge upon the earth. People are the earth's best, most precious natural resource.

Prosperous people tend to like and defend their clean air and water. Impoverished people tend to not have garbage pickup service.

Me, I'd like to buy 800 square feet with space for a 2400 square foot garden. Nothing like that exists here. Less roof. More soil. Perhaps that should be a meme.

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Dania Ellingson's avatar

I've come back to this essay multiple times in the last few days because I just can't stop thinking about it. You hit the feeling I've been chasing for quite some time now. Thank you for the work you're doing here.

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