Blending Nature with Development: A New Land Stewardship Ethos Emerges
American Forests, Spring 2007
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Communities, too, are looking for new means to reconcile inevitable growth with conservation. On the North Fork of Long Island, a 25-mile-long patchwork of farms, vineyards, scrub-oak forests, and picturesque ocean inlets 75 miles from New York City, voters in 1998 endorsed a conservation program that has underwritten large-scale purchases of land for preserves and purchases of development rights to keep farms in agriculture.
“It’s been tremendously successful,” says Tim Timothy J. Caufield, vice president of the Peconic Land Trust, which coordinates the purchases. “Of unsubdivided land that’s gone through either a development or a preservation process, we’ve been able to preserve 94 percent.”
At the same time, home prices have skyrocketed as growth pressure collides with restricted supply, a burden that hits hardest those who have long lived in the area. “The problem is that local people make their living in what I call the Main Street economy, but real estate is dominated by people in the Wall Street economy,” explains David Kapell, the mayor of Greenport, the largest of the North Fork villages. “They are anywhere between 70 and 80 percent of real estate transactions.”
Kapell has supported a development of 128 houses intended to be affordable to locals, consistent with a local planning idea that such housing be located in a “halo” of land wrapping each of the Fork’s half dozen villages that can accept denser development. But people who had embraced the idea in the abstract now object to the new houses on small lots that threaten to hem them in. “Nobody wants it in their backyard,” Kapell says.
The villages haven’t figured out how to resolve their future yet, in part because they have not fully appreciated how the large-scale forces from outside are acting on their tiny farm towns. Real-estate pressures not only come from nearby Long Island suburbs and Manhattan, but from a second-home market that’s gone global. Real-estate agents promise to find newly minted Asian millionaire buyers in hours over the Internet. Buyers from so far away bring an entirely different set of values to townscapes that have evolved in response to a unique climate and environment for over 300 years.
Failing to understand the larger context in which communities today operate can undermine the best laid, most public-spirited plans, permitting development to trump preservation — through overbuilding, through too many badly designed, eroding roads, through failure to maintain critical habitats. “Development will occur whether we like it or not,” says Kapell. If the North Fork ignores the problem of housing teachers, nurses, and retail clerks, he says, “Social and market forces will combine to force solutions. That’s the way Long Island has developed over the last 50 years, and it has resulted in the gobbling up of open space.”
Integrating the built and the natural world cannot be expected to do what national parks and wilderness areas have set out to do. Nor can it reap the quick profits of bulldozer suburbs. But it may be a means to vastly extend the reach of pure preservation efforts, while engaging a great many more people productively with our most precious places.