Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Ummm, yeah

Local environmental guru Stan Sersen tells us, in this month's column for the biz monthly, how not all developers are evil. Well, what he actually says is that developers like him are not evil. The other developers are evil, greedy people who want to develop farmland and open space without regard to anything but short term profits. I don't agree with his take on this matter.

Anyway, the part of his column that really had my attention was the following:

According to the United States Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service and its National Resources Inventory Urbanization and Development of Rural Land 2001, the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States has now elevated the housing market as the scaffolding that is holding up the American economy.

So when the housing market collapses, as it has recently, the economic impacts are more devastating and harder and harder to recover from. That's why new ways of development are being sought within our communities, abroad and at home.


I thought it was strange that the Dept of Ag would opine on manufacturing jobs and the housing market. That struck me as a little outside the realm of their expertise (if they have any expertise). Even more odd was that the report was using data from 2001, which was before the housing boom took off. I found this all to be so bizzare that I took a look at the report that Sersen referenced (download it here) to see exactly what the Dept of Ag had to say about such matters.

The report does not say anything at all about manufacturing jobs or the housing market. Sersen must be seeing things that aren't there.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If that's not how you see it, then how do you see it?

PZGURU said...

That guy is just like any other salesperson - he's pitching HIS product as the best way to go. He's not greedy (debatable) he's enviro friendly (a trendy thing to be these days) and he's only concerned about the well being of everyone else.

This smacks of the same hypcorisy of the holywood elite like Robert Redford, who preach about preserving nature - of course - the preaching started AFTER Redford developed a nice pristine mountainside tract of land into a ski resort. Got to love it.