I never understand this mentality. Keep undeveloped land undeveloped for what? People would rather have unemployment and opiate addicts instead of development and progress.
I don't think GP is advocating to keep the land undeveloped. They even go so far as the point out how the area makes a lot of sense for developers. The problems they identify seem to be 1) the reckless abandon to which developers are damaging ecosystems 2) an economic situation that allows developers to benefit significantly without these benefits necessarily passing into the community 3) the significant challenges of rapid population growth and 4) the fact that this development threatens their home. These are worth discussing and balancing against any benefits.
I also object your false dichotomy, and the idea that employment and "progress" (I doubt we can ever objectively make such a declaration) are zero-sum here.
It's a game all of these firms play - have locales compete against each other (In some cases literally like the HQ2 debacle from Amazon) to see who can provide the largest package of tax incentives and subsidies and then hope nobody follows up on the absolute fantasy financial / Economic impact projections that were made.
The opposite. It is those of us who live here who are paying for the new water and sewer lines and roads and street lights and law enforcement. Not the developers nor the big corporations who are getting abatements.
The Project, not Intel. It is Intel Project motivating the improvements which are making it possible for AWS, the box stores, the fast food joints, Google, and others to move in too. Intel the focal point for the money from the local governments, the state government, and the federal government to help make this happen.
Keep it undeveloped for what, you ask? Interestingly this featureless wasted space is likely the home of a rich ecosystem evolved and evolving right here. And this very ecosystem may well support human thriving too in ways that people whooshing past won’t begin to understand.
> People would rather have unemployment and opiate addicts instead of development and progress.
So that’s our choice - big box stores and Amazon warehouses or opiate addicts and unemployment? In this formulation, the more progress, the fewer opiate addicts. So if we roll the clock back to, say, the mid 1500’s the whole continent would have been full of opiate addicts. Or possibly the directionality of the relationship is wrong. Or opiate addiction and unemployment are a little more complicated than that there’s “unused” land around.
People always forget that there's plenty of land and you don't need to engage in greenfield really. You just need to build up. Keeping the ecosystems intact is much more important than keeping around a poorly insulated tinderbox of a home that was built in 3 weeks by unskilled laborers in 1935 around until the end of time. Ecosystems take thousands of years sometimes to develop all of their organic connectivity that we routinely destroy in no time at all.
I have a similar situation--I live in a small town 45 minutes from a large city, surrounded by farmland. Aside from the farmers, most of the people here work either remotely or in the city, and choose to live here because it's quiet and not full of, ironically, drug addicts like the city.
But we're not looking down our noses from high rise Silicon Valley condos, so I guess we're all a bunch of unwashed degenerates.
I live (mostly) a good hour and a half away from the capital city in a state three times larger than Texas, the state pop. is a bit above 2 million and the urban population (one capital city with extensive sprawl, several very large towns) is also a bit under 2 million.
The very few hundred thousand or so that have the bulk of the space to ourselves are extremely happy to keep it "undeveloped", outside of agriculture, forest work, and mining sites with most (and all new ones) having strict controls about rehabilition .. in keeping with traditional land holders with some 70K years of history invested here.
I've heard of cities - I did my STEM degrees in "the most remote city in the world" (according to some early US astronauts astounded to see light in the darkness) and went on to write a few million SLOC in earth mapping and signal processing while doing geophysical field work (and WGS84 "ground truthing") across ~ two thirds of the 190+ countries across the globe - but rarely ever in cities.
It's odd to realise we've transitioned (as a species) from < %50 living in urban environments to > %50 within the past 40 or so years.
> Seems like development and new jobs would be helpful for the area, no?
Maybe, maybe not. Those tell me about Ohio in general, not the area the parent commenter is talking about. Either way, I'd be inclined to ask the people who live there what they want, not prescribe "development and jobs" from my ivory tower while insulting them.
My point is that you're making a pretty absurd false dichotomy. It's either "unemployment and opiate addicts", or having your quiet rural home paved over? Those are the only two choices?
In Ohio your property taxes get reassessed periodically. So as the local market goes up so does you tax burden. People really do get priced out of their home, sometimes priced out of the area entirely, especially if they are living on a fixed income.
Maybe, but that's not always the case. In the US, powers of eminent domain have at times been delegated to private entities. If there's a clear public benefit for seizure of land, sometimes the landowners don't have much of a choice.
