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October 10, 2001

Open space. Part salvation! Part Smallpox!

Open Space, that panacea desired by so many, turns out to have many similarities to certain powerful medicines. Heroin for example. Medicines can be highly addictive. Medicines can have very serious side effects. So can the restrictions on land use implicit in defining it as open space. For example, land set aside for open space, including large parts of Pacifica, often stops producing taxes, especially after owners tire of paying taxes on land when they realize there's little hope of being allowed to develop it to its real potential. Though open space advocates find it convenient to deny it, what we're dealing with is a form of confiscation. Open space diminishes the amount of land available for homes and commercial development needed by a growing population. It raises the cost of the land that's left. Up goes the cost of housing for all of us. When the land that remains shoots up in price, the only practical way of using it efficiently is to build larger, often multi-story homes. (Some people call these "Monster" homes. They result from lack of moderately priced land). Lack of land drives people out of cities they'd prefer. It's most efficient to live close to where you work. The farther from a job, the more money/time to commute, and the more waste. Some Pacifica police and firefighters provide excellent examples. Spend two or three hours a day spent driving 50 or 100 miles to and from a job. Multiply by several thousand commuters. You've added a tremendous and unproductive burden.

Open space can be useful. A farmer can often continue to farm who might have been forced out of a particular piece of ag land because urban uses could have offered more immediate cash.

Open space is addictive. If 10 percent of a city can be reserved for open space, why not 20%. Or, as in Pacifica, 50 percent is already publicly owned permanent, non-taxed, underused open space. Even though half our city is already set aside, another 19 percent, now in private ownership, is under a great deal of official pressure to be removed from both tax rolls and productive use. (I refer to some of the private land listed in the Open Space Task Force Report). It's a one-way street. No land trust, city, county or open space district has ever concluded it should quit withdrawing lands from productive, tax-enhancing, uses.

Large parts of Sweeney Ridge, fully one-eighth of Pacifica, was formerly under private ownership. As part of the GGNRA it serves only a tiny handful of people each year. The owners sold to the Federal Government, but only after efforts to develop the acreage had been repeatedly stifled. Strangulation effectively stops folks from breathing. Over-regulation and confiscatory governmental red tape can "persuade" land owners they've no choice but sell out to a land trust or government at a bargain price. Unfortunately, as I see the juggernaut rolling over taxpaying landowners small, medium and large, I can do little but shudder in horror. Those active in land trusts and open space districts have little to lose. They don't use their own cash. They just talk a lot, and twist a few arms. What's more, like all zealots, they're utterly convinced they're accomplishing only good works. Like Junipero Serra and his associates, who brought the native Americans of California both salvation and (inadvertently) Smallpox, they're never aware of the harm they do, just the good.

If you wish, you can send Paul Azevedo e-mail at Paul@thereactor.net or check his website at http://www.thereactor.net.

 
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