Consider buying rural land in 2009

The year 2008 started out not so good for a lot of people and ended up worse than anyone imagined.

We begin 2009 afraid of what’s coming. Most of us are scared about our income. So we are spending less and beginning to horde. Cash in hand feels like a good long-term investment. Read more »

Land ownership helps rural economic development: Can we Land a Hand?

Land has always been involved in what we now call, rural economic development.

Those who owned no land in rural communities were almost always poor. The larger the landholding, the more prosperous the owner was likely to be.

The desire for land and its resources motivated European settlement to the New World, and the expected benefits of land ownership lay behind America’s westward expansion.

Cheap land was the stimulus that drove American settlement and economic growth for 250 years. Communities grew in step with the degree of diffused ownership.

As our economy shifted from farming to manufacturing to services, new growth engines came into play. But in rural areas, land ownership continues to be a ladder for individual betterment. And to the extent that it’s “spread around,” in Barack Obama’s words, communities benefit.

In the 40 years that I’ve watched public efforts to promote rural economic development, I’ve never seen much focus on encouraging land ownership by lower-income individuals. The preferred strategies invested in public infrastructure (highways, water and sewerage systems, communications) and public intellectual capacity (planners, agencies), and provided public capital (loans, tax breaks, buildings, subsidies and labor training). Read more »

The Knight Before Christmas

(With apologies to Clement Moore, and my 11th-grade English teacher, Miss DeFrance, who said, correctly, that I was a lousy poet.)

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a ’puter was stirring, not even a mouse;

Round the tree, our few presents there we had heaped,

As we cursed the economy bleep, bleep and bleep.

The last nickel of ours, like a star on tree top,

There it shone and inspired amid the Great Flop.

When out on the lawn, I heard such a racket, Read more »

Rethinking stocks: Put land in a real-estate IRA for retirement

I’m sure there are three people in America who figured the stock market just right this year and are swimming in money like Donald’s Uncle Scrooge. I am not among them. And neither are millions of others who didn’t duck out. Read more »

Thanksgiving is no turkey

You can’t go too far wrong with a good Thanksgiving.

For starters, everything smells good all day, even me. Then, everybody’s nice as pie for as long as they can stand it.

It’s our only holiday when we’re supposed to think about what we eat, the folks who produced it and the land it comes from. Thoughts of Pilgrims and Indians may flash by between a wing and the prayer. Then everyone falls asleep watching the Detroit Lions lose another football game.

I’ve shirked my fatherly duties to 23-year-old Molly. She never got either my three-hour, before-the-meal lecture on The True Meaning of Thanksgiving or my four-hour, after-the-meal talk on Indigestion, Its Causes and Cures. Molly has always been happy with her modest vegetarian meal, which excludes all meat and vegetables and incorporates, she says, the good kind of calories that are concentrated in buttered rolls, pies and whipped cream.

I’ve never told her that I was once related by marriage to Oceanus Hopkins, the one child born on the Mayflower during its two-month crossing in 1620. Oceanus made no other history in his three years, though in times like these all of us admire the value his parents placed on liquidity. Read more »