RoR: Forum

Post 0

Monday, December 10, 2007 - 4:55pm

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Absolutely brilliant. In many ways real estate is the seemy underbelly of capitalism. The laws are medieval. It is called "real" because only land was real. Tools, books, knowledge, these were not. Land is "real" because you cannot carry it away. It is called "estate" because title originates with the king: ex-state. The king can make you the Baron of Graymatter and if you change religions or something, the king can take your title away.

While we do have "titles" to our cars, most of industrial property, most commercial value, is transferred without laborious title searches, title transfer paperwork, title insurance, etc., etc., even though, like land, billions of dollars of wealth -- say an oil refinery or the launch of a package of space communications satellites -- can be "mortgaged" and be at risk.

Unlike a symphony or a steel mill, no one creates land. Seldom does land ever go away. Walk away from a farm for a hundred years and walk away from a factory for a hundred years. The farm will actually replenish itself. It will need to be cleared, etc., but the soil will be in better condition than when it was abandoned. Factories are not so robust.

We sing mystical songs about land. "This land is your land, this land my land from the Gulf Stream waters to the New York island..." and "Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride..." and "... for purple mountain's majesty ...." We do not sing mystical songs about industrial processes or mathematical algorithms.

For these and many other reasons, the real estate markets are among the most controlled, most volatile and cyclical, and least resilient.

No wonder they are so funny!

Post 1

Monday, December 10, 2007 - 8:54pm

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Stony Fields and Secondary Succession, not the Fields of Elysium

If one thinks of a farm on the perceptual level, of course one thinks of green fertile land. But farmland has to be cleared of stones in order to be plowed. I know this, I've had to do it, and it's a bitch. Farmland has to be fertilized and watered. Certain pest plants give off poisons that kill other plants and make the soil unworkable. The land can be poisoned with salt if not properly irrigated and drained. Land does disappear - ask the Dutch. Stony fields don't clear themselves. Stumps don't up and walk away. Yes, perfect farmland left fallow for a few years may improve marginally. Farm land left for a century reverts to old-growth forest. Much of the farmland of Roman Trans-Alpine Gaul is now the succession forests of Provence. Much of the open prairie-land of the west had been kept such by Indians who periodically burned out the underbrush. Conservationists kept out the fires for years, until when they did come, the land was burnt to ash and the soil blew away. If one thinks perceptually, of green farms and prairies as natural givens, one can make plenty of mistakes.

Ted Keer

Post 2

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - 6:28am

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Ted, thanks for the emendations and amendments. Yes, we must apply intelligence to any natural resource in order to benefit from it. From 2002-2005, we lived outside Traverse City, Michigan, which looks pretty wild and untamed, but is second growth, the first having been harvested in the great lumber years that first opened the area. The glaciers that retreated left a lot of Canada behind and as in New England, farms have these walls of rocks and stones separating fields -- when they prove even that useful. Barns have rock foundations, but you can only do so much of that, as well. So, yes, left unminded (literally without a human mind), farmland, will become wasteland. That said, compared to a factory, it is a quantum step down. To use Isabel Paterson's model real estate is a lower stage of energy transmission. Again,I agree that the entirety of the problem is more than a couple of paragraphs can describe.

Post 3

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - 5:22pm

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You rubbed a sore spot, Mike. I double majored in bio & philosophy, and in bio I concentrated on botany. Rutgers has a to notch Plant Ecology course for undergrads, and its Cook College is the state land-grant college.

Succession (primary and secondary) is a fascinating subject. Much of the East Coast that was once cleared for farmland has reverted to oak dominated forest where it hasn't become "sprawl" - a convenient if unfortunate term. The East used to be dominated by American elm and chestnut, with an estimated one-third of the trees being prolifically fruiting chestnuts. The crop was said to cover the ground in a carpet of nuts in good years. Nowadays the elm and chestnut trees are gone, almost extinct, and land left fallow is first colonized by goldenrod, then cedar and mulberry, then pine and oak and other hardwood. The dominant elm and chestnut with their huge heights are gone, so oak most often becomes the climax vegetation.

In the West, in California and in Yosemite, Indian tribes used to burn out the scrublands leaving oak-dominated prairie-land (trees and meadows) which was highly productive with alternating patches of grass for razing and trees for cover with acorn crops and berry bushes at the edges of oak copses. Yosemite was a wonder in part because the Indians had set fire to the scrub periodically. When it became a national park, the fires were stopped, the meadows became densely wooded, and then, finally, catastrophic fires burnt out much of the park. Even today, the land does not support the same amount of game it did when the Indians managed it with fire and bow.

Ted Keer