> Even if cherries don’t pay, Hallstedt is determined to keep his farmland from becoming yet another subdivision. But to keep the orchard, Hallstedt said he needs to be able to stay in business.
Please tell me that "subdivision" here doesn't mean residential development.
Anyways, it's probably a good thing that food is so cheap that you need to create it at large scale to make any money off it.
Food production exists to feed people, not prop up small contributors to the food supply because their goods have been made too cheap and affordable for everyone.
New residential development and purchasing recently had numbers come out, they’re pretty bad.
If someone is buying land to subdivide, they would be better of not doing so.
Am I missing something?
Whether the developers would be profitable or not building housing on a given tract of land doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the article or quote.
The quote is presumably someone who doesn't want to sell their farm to residential developers period.
Great. We are 8 million homes behind - I love that people get rich real easy is reason enough for people to go without homes.
Smh for this world we've made.
Are the land developers supposed to lose money and be charitable? Costs for both materials and labor have up due to inflation, Covid, etc. How could you expect something different?
Why do you want people to be homeless and overpaying for housing just to depress the price of food?
The person I quoted presumably wants both increased food prices (so they are profitable) and less housing development (their unprofitable farm doesn't become a subdivision).
And the opposition to their position would be someone who wants more housing (just sell the unprofitable farm land) and increasingly cheap food (the reason they're unprofitable).
So I'm not sure where you're getting the position of less housing + cheap food.
> Please tell me that "subdivision" here doesn't mean residential development.
Probably. I can't speak to the person quoted in the article, but for many owners of agricultural land, selling to developers for building tract housing is actually the goal. Farming is treated as a capital business, not a labor one, and any profits from agriculture are the intermediary dividends paid out while waiting for the land to appreciate enough to be valuable for another purpose (usually suburban housing developments).