“Be careful what you wish for,” an old saying cautions in the back of my mind. We might want to pay heed to that bit of wisdom when hoping to lure money into a community.
Lindsay’s past redevelopment strategies were based on the hope of attracting middle class folks to re-populate the town. When the housing market ballooned, then popped, what we had left was a lot of poorer, working class people paying mortgages far too high for their incomes and massive civic indebtedness. The high-rollers left to live and spend somewhere else.
The price for agricultural land has recently ballooned to 10 times what it was a decade ago. Certainly there are those who welcome the investors who are making rich men out of former farmers and previously starving realtors, assuming this new wealth will trickle through the community’s hands somehow, some way. But I see this hot air balloon as a community crisis in the making.
When I ask what has driven the per-acre prices from $3,000 to $30,000, I am told it is the presence of investors (including foreign) with too much money and no safe place to put it. In the mid-1980’s, the presence of foreign investors buying up Valley farm land for big bucks sent red alerts through the media and the populace, as did the presence of US insurance companies and doctors & dentists following their example. We understood it then as an incursion into the rural economy that could and eventually would displace other members of that financial ecosystem: family farmers, farm workers, local processors and town businesses, even local governments.
An article in the current issue of The Nation describes how this works in urban areas. “How to Dump Tenants and Make a Fortune: The chaotic, abusive process by which New York’s affordable housing is vanishing,” by D.W. Gibson (July 6/13, 2015) describes the current assault of investors on residential real estate. Although almost half of the apartments in that city’s five boroughs - a million units in total - have been under rent-stabilization regulations for decades, making it possible for working and middle class families to live there, the pressure of money is crumbling those regulations. “That number is falling quickly,” Gibson states, “as New York’s high-end housing market continues to balloon from the heat of global capital.” The article’s examples of tactics used by these investors to rid themselves of lower-paying residents are inhuman.
Global capital. I was glad to have a name for it finally,
this faceless force having its way with ag land, our primary resource. I fear that one of the real motives behind
these high prices is the value of groundwater pumped for sale on the open
market, not the productive capability of land.
I fear that, by the time these investors are through re-arranging the
Valley’s waterscape to suit their income needs, what’s left of our rural
economy won’t be worth what you can wring from a wet washrag.
“Global capital” has some problems
as a name, however. It depersonalizes
the force, makes it less subject to our protests, makes us feel less able to
object. I’d like to provide an
alternative handle, borrowing a line from John Pitney’s “Farmchild Song:” monsters.
“Daddy, I see monsters in the land,” the son sings after listening to
his parents talk about Uncle Cargill and how their farm operations are impinged
upon by global ag conglomerates.
Let us think about how we might
address these monsters moving into our land, and how we might compel them to be
neighbors instead.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.
You can send her your monster sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA
93247 or leave a comment below.
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