The New York Times yesterday featured a compelling story about the devastation wrought by the mortgage industry and the housing boom – frenetic home construction in farm fields, feverish real-estate speculation, then plummeting home values, foreclosures, layoffs, hunger, vacancy and despair.
But there is a missing element to the story: the environmental carnage wrought by the housing bubble and suburban sprawl.
The story, “Florida’s Crossroads of Foreclosure and Despair,” describes how a vast swath of farmland, four times the size of Manhattan, was quickly converted to blacktop and cookie-cutter subdivisions, between 2004 and 2006, as 13,183 homes were raised in Lehigh Acres, Fla. The human catastrophe of this overbuilding and then crash is vividly illustrated by the article.
But what about the countryside that was ripped apart for this madness? What about all the polluted runoff from this orgy of building? The credit pushers used our natural world as the raw material they could chew up to feed their greed.
This story has relevance for our Chesapeake Bay region, as well. Bay Daily believes there is a connection between the housing boom of the last decade and the erosion of water quality in the Chesapeake Bay.
By some accounts, momentum for cleaning up the Bay built in the 1980’s and 1990’s – but then that momentum stopped this decade. Perhaps that backsliding happened because the Bush administration weakened environmental regulations and enforcement. Maybe the soaring popularity of SUV’s and other gas-guzzling big vehicles – which spew more nitrogen dioxide exhaust that pollutes the Bay – played a role.
And perhaps another important factor was suburban sprawl that galloped along from 2003-2007, before crashing.
What do you think, Bay Daily readers? Do you see any echoes of the Chesapeake in “Florida’s Crossroads of Foreclosure and Despair?”
In other news:
• The Washington Post provides a detailed examination the rockfish poaching scandal that broke last week, calling it a “dockside Donnie Brasco tale.” The poachers allegedly used knives to create fake fish-hook wounds on fish to make it look like they were caught by anglers instead of in large (and perhaps illegal) nets.
• A blue crab conservation plan in Virginia would spend $3 million in federal relief funds to buy back the crabbing licenses of watermen who agree to stop catching crabs.
• Author Tom Horton advocates down zoning as a strategy to slow growth and sprawl on Maryland’s eastern shore.
• The brilliant wildlife photography of CBF Senior Educator Bill Portlock is on display online and at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, N.Y.
(Photo above by Bill Portlock; top photo by CBF staff)
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