Zoning

When I sent you over to Sponge-headed scienceman's site for the LL Bean post, he got into a fun conversation with Anna about development and various types of environmentalists. It put me in mind of my father, who lived in Westford MA most of his life. It was farm country - dairy and orchard, mostly - most of that time, and he liked tweaking new suburbanites at town meetings who wanted the town to keep its traditional character. He would describe where the two slaughterhouses (he would say abattoir so they wouldn't figure it out until they went home) stood kittycorner near the center of town. He wasn't anti-development but found it a bit frustrating. As suburbs creep out, the value of the farmland goes up, so the taxes go up. At 4AM in March when you're getting along in years and milking cows while you've got a bug of some sort, what with the tax bite and the offered selling price, a lot of farmers pack it in. Nice big houses go up, and their owners want all development to stop right there.

Late in life he said to me "We built a town that our children can't afford to move into."