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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (31072)	8/21/2000 10:17:11 PM
From: Ish	Respond to of 769667

<<Theoretically, could you take say a Chicago suburb, tear down the houses, pull up the roads and turn it back into farm land? >> Tough. First the cost. Buying it and tearing down everything lets say $3 million per acre, on the cheap side, that would have a return of $50 bucks an acre per year. Compaction and drainage all fucked up. Until the world is in starvation, no homes will be lost.

To: DMaA who wrote (31072)	8/21/2000 10:29:32 PM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 769667

turn it back into farm land Assuming it is not too polluted with things that don't degrade, such as heavy metals or radioactive materials then it could probably grow crops. It would be necessary to tear down enough of the urban environment to have a reasonable size farm, or several to support the associated infrustructure. The real problem with sprawl is that it raises the price of land. Now that may sound like the kind of problem the owner would like to have, but it makes the land difficult to use for farming with increased taxes and a decreased opportunity to expand. The land I have has been increasing quite a bit and it's 10 miles from any suburbs. The real estate developers have a difficult time persuading some farmers to sell them land near the city, so they go out 10-15 miles and buy land. They then trade this to those farmers with close in land who want to continue farming. They will sometimes give them 2 acres away from the city for every acre that they want to subdivide. This makes land that is fairly distant from a city priced too high to turn a profit through agriculture. If a farm is not big enough then you can't use the expensive equipment efficiently, and the small farmers keep losing their farms. TP